CHOR 1 pp.

7996 Intellect Limited 2010

Choreographic Practices
Volume 1
2010 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/chor.1.79_1

PETRA KUPPERS
University of Michigan

Butoh Rhizome: Choreography of a

moving writing self

Keywords Abstract
butoh This article enacts the multiplicity of sensations and ways of thinking through movement in a particular
disability butoh dance. Narratives of independent selves become disrupted by meditations on disability and language,
Hijikata translation and representation, and the unfolding of somatic consciousness.
Olimpias
choreography
dance and writing When I write about the physical act of dancing, unique assemblies of thought often occur.
embodiment These thoughts often re-inform my choreography and performance. My body as performer is
Agamben more inclusive in the aftermath of writing a dance.
(Hay 2000: 28)

We are surrounded by a mass of tricky symbols and systems Modern people are aware of
the dark uneasiness in front of their eyes but we shake hands with the dead, who send us
encouragement from beyond the body. This is the unlimited power of butoh In our body,

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history is hidden and will appear in each detail of our expressions. In butoh we can find,
touch, our hidden reality something can be born, can appear, living and dying at the same
moment. The character and basis of butoh is a hidden violence. It is a filthy child who has the
special ability for butoh because he knows how to create beautiful patterns. Butoh should
be viewed as enigmatic as life itself. I am not sure in the end whether it is a trap or a secret
correspondence with something.
(Hijikata 1985, unpaginated program notes)

The collective assemblage is always like the murmur from which I take my proper name, Lets write in
dance
the constellation of voices, concordant or not, from which I draw my voice. [] To write is
perhaps to bring this assemblage of the unconscious to the light of day, to select the whisper-
ing voices, to gather the tribes and secret idioms from which I extract something I call myself
(moi). I is an order word.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 84, emphasis in the original)

Lets write in dance. In this article meditation, I share the touch of my trembling muscles willed into
a writing turn: choreography, choreo, khoreia, chorus. I am witnessing the rhizome of my body danc-
ing, the multiplicity of an I dispersed in sensation and movement; Deleuze and Guattaris whisper-
ing voices assembling, out of Hijikatas mass of tricky symbols and systems, the hidden histories:
graphy, graphia, writing. I think of a stylus, quill, pen, of the single point that assembles the multiple
sensations and experiences of a dance, knitting together the spatial and temporal impulses that
move through me, distilling a narrative.
This article has different voices, different modes of attention, and it witnesses my embodied
thought-processes while dancing. The layout of the article reflects different modalities of dancing
thinking, thinking in multiplicity, thinking through others thought while moving, but the edges and
delineations are not as clean as a paper form and the conventions of quotations might imply. I hope
to show choreography in action by working with and through my dance reading at the time of my
dancing, and through the lengthy quotations that accompany this essay (their selection in turn
informed by the dances dramaturgy).

(Yoko) Ashikawa [one of the female founders of butoh] taught that butoh grows out of felt mass of tricky
symbols and
imagery, and that internalizing the idea or image is the difficult part, because you must get rid
of the conscious effort of visualizing before you can internalize. She added that the audience

systems
for butoh might not receive the exact image the dancer internalizes, but they cannot mistake
the imaginistic [sic] process. The process for imaging for both the dancer and the audience is
the aesthetic core of butoh. Butoh accepts that fiction is another kind of reality, she said,

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Should you be able to really visualize an enormous eye looking at you from behind? she
asked. The answer is basically Yes.
(Fraleigh 1999: 142)

My side rests on the black floor of the stage. Above me, my arm grows upwards. A different energy
turns me, ever so slowly, forward. Both movements are very specific. I am in my arm: I am in my
back and stomach muscles, calibrating pressure. Its hard to keep so slow, so still. I have rehearsed
this, prepared for this. My focus is in my arm, in my core muscles, in two (and more) places. And
yet, I feel honed down, narrow and wide at the same time. I know now, writing this down, that I am
not with the audience, with my form on the ground, with the light changing on me. I am not control-
ling my arm and my core from one central place: there is no connection between these two move-
ments of my flesh. But there is me, thinking this: strangely aside, and yet fully present, as my dual
focus continues.
I am dancing as part of Burning (Berkeley, California, and other sites, 20082010). Burning is an
Olimpias project1 and cites butoh not so much as a specific technique allegiance or cultural embed-
ment, but in relation to a mode of thinking about bodies and intensities: about cultivating the poet-
ics of bodily meaning Yoko Ashikawa speaks about. Burning is a show about membranes and My side rests on
penetration, about interdependence: cell membranes, cancer growth, neurological difference, envi-
ronmental toxins, permeability, and being permeated by/open to physical and cultural influence. Its the black floor of
a show created by people who, in the main, identify as disabled, and who now wish to explore the
depth and heft of the meanings of disability and medical imagery. the stage. Above
Lets grow these images we cannot escape, water them with our blood, let the garden of mean-
ings blossom in our flesh, words, images. We move intensely, sometimes imperceptibly, and let me, my arm
words and practices sift through us. Butoh is one of the training modalities we employ, and, together,
we familiarize ourselves with the heritage of this movement form, and its links to representations of grows upwards.
disability in contemporary performance.
A different energy
The prime objective of No is not so much movement as the creation of this corporeal inten-
sity. Paradoxically, the surest way to achieve this goal is to restrain ones movements. This turns me, ever so
is why Zeamis teaching is based on the following principle: Move the mind ten tenths,
the body seven tenths. The remaining three tenths constitute potential movement and give slowly, forward.
the body its intensity. It is only later that the flesh of virtuosity and the skin of beauty are
engrafted onto the skeletal structure of the body. Both movements
[And] though buto is at odds with accepted aesthetic models, it has certain similarities
with No in the sense that it is concerned with becoming rather than performing. It seeks are very specific.
primarily to bring to the surface a body which has hitherto been latent. Performing takes

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second place. Only the presence of this particular body (Zeamis skeletal structure) allows
the flesh (movement) and the skin (expression) to come into play. When they do, says
I am in my
Zeami, the instants when nothing is done become captivating. Both No and buto dancers
thus concentrate entirely on their inner selves; they try to capture the subtlest sensations of
arm: I am in
their bodies and control their slightest movements. Hence their extreme slowness.
(Amagasaki 1996)
my back and
Noh specialist Akira Amagasaki captures features of the butoh form by speaking about its kinship to
stomach muscles,
the performance energies of Noh theatre.2 With this, Amagasaki offers an alternative genealogy to
the dominant mode of introducing this 1950s dance movement in English-language publications.
calibrating
Butoh is often written about in reference to the devastation of Hiroshima, and to the adoption of
techniques of German expressionist dance this is the main narrative that emerges in many US
pressure. Its hard
reviews of the form.3 Some butoh practitioners in the US and Canada, such as Kokoro Dance, specif-
ically reference the destruction caused by the US nuclear bomb, e.g. holding the World War II dead
to keep so slow,
in a dancers arms like a contemporary pieta. Kokoro present their performance as a call for corporeal
compassion, an intervention into transnational affects. Others, such as the NYC-based couple Eiko
so still. I have
and Koma4, acknowledge but do not specifically stress this origin narrative, and offer a performance
experience of energy and attention (one more in keeping with the approach Amagasaki describes).
rehearsed this,
Each butoh performer has to find a way to come to terms and be captivated by the multiple
origin narratives and technique inspirations butoh offers.5 In the introduction to an important collec-
prepared for this
tion of translated butoh writings, the editors reference the writings of one of butohs founders,
Hijikata Tatsumi, as self-mystifying, which is itself a comment on the evasive, open nature of a
writing that refuses the sense and grammar of words and movement (Hijikata and Nanako 2000: 12).
This sense of evasion is heightened by the discussions of translation in relation to butoh writings.
Many of the interesting verbal images are unstable in themselves, and scholars of Japanese perform-
ance query the appropriateness of translational practices, i.e., the disparate fit between certain
English and Japanese formulations. This hyper-verbal yet elusive poetic framing, combined with the
de-stabilizing of complex translation, offers nourishing soil to the discursively inclined dancer.
There is much to stem against in butoh writing: formative writings on gender and butoh edge
close to disgust with flesh (often female flesh), and abjection of the body. I have not personally
experienced this abjection in my work as part of US butoh communities in the 1990s and 2000s
(most recently, with the Bare Bones butoh group in San Francisco, and with the Butoh San Francisco
Festival).6 To me, the poetics of becoming, combined with the intellectual excitement of a poetic
sense/word universe, provide the draw of the hybrid butoh work I encounter when working side
by side with people who infuse butoh with their Native American roots, with contact improvisa-
tion, or with break-dancing.7 My butoh experience lies in the zone between reading about and

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making physical the modulations of energy, the dis/connect between corporeal instruction and
literary seduction.8
I invite my
How can an audience and a performer create a force field, a palpable energy beyond narrative
but which emerges from poetic imagery? Ashikawa says that dance has its roots in our flesh
arm to not be
deeply intertwined with intuitions and the free play of our emotions, transfiguring the body (Fraleigh
1999: 142). These flesh roots and Amagasakis corporeal intensity (1996, no pagination) provide the
connected to
background to my performance explorations. I think about all this, subtle sensations, flesh roots,
corporeal intensity, for a split second, before I will myself back into the full presence of my move-
my breath, my
ment. These thoughts ghost into the background, and I trace the tingling of the nerves.
Butoh: habitation, allowing something else, an outside, to move me.9 To me, this movement is
slow turning
about invitation. I invite my arm to not be connected to my breath, my slow turning movement. I
invite my core to not be connected to the weight of the arm: when the matter of the arm begins to
movement. I
interfere with the balance of my slow rotation. The arm is other: an external pressure that needs
adjusting to, not a connection of the same, recognized flesh. In the stillness of slow movement, in
invite my core to
the tensing of minute muscles, I am present. This contradiction between dispersal and presence,
exertion and observation, is what I invite in this dance.
not be connected
In one of Komas workshops, he repeats again and again: the body wants to move. Eiko and
to the weight of
Koma speak of delicious movement born out of spaciousness and attention.
(workshop communication)
the arm: when
Plant movement. Rhizome: connected disconnect, a tendency towards the non-hierarchical that always
the matter of
already fails, that always already approaches its limit. External stimuli shape the movement, as the
Gardener, Neil Marcus, one of the other dancers on stage with me, transfers his energy to my arm
the arm begins
through his eyes, his focus, his breath, his small movements. The hairs on my arm feel a wind of breath
running over them, and pull the skin, the muscle and the blood towards the origin. My fingertips feel the
to interfere with
weight of a gaze on them. A touch of a foreign finger on these fingers. On each finger. On the tiny hairs
on the fingers. On the rills of my fingertips: on impossibly small sectors for which I have no name. A
the balance of
slight articulation of the shoulder, which shudders upwards towards the hand. Beneath, the torso turns.
This is a dance that invites a walk in the impossible. I invite the emptiness of an I, and use
my slow rotation
tension and vibration to open up to the possibility of no-control in that highly careful control of the
fibrous pull of my muscle tissue. The plant, the human, the I: the tension between the arboreal,
centrally organized system and the rhizomatic, dispersed one, become the shape I follow in my skin, This is a dance
my blood, my muscle. I am in an openness to stimuli that attempts to keep representation at bay: I
do not dance a plant. I do not visualize a particular flower or tree; I try to focus on the abstract that invites a
function of plant instead. I attempt to not be enfolded in the specific, to not be I to a Not-I, but

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to be in both and all places, all the many places between I and Not-I. My method is in the para-
dox of dispersed movement. Dance knows what my everyday speech does not know. But my writ-
walk in the
ing, like Deleuze and Guattaris writing, can begin to know it again. Something is out of my grasp,
and this article reassembles something.
impossible.
While Ankoku Butoh can be said to have possessed a very precise method and philosophy
I invite the
(perhaps it could be called inherited butoh), I regard present day butoh as a tendency that
depends not only on Hijikatas philosophical legacy but also on the development of new and
emptiness of
diverse modes of expression. The tendency that I speak of involves extricating the pure life
which is dormant in our bodies.
an I, and use
(Iwana 2002)
tension and
These thoughts and others about butohs invitation to pure life (to being taken over by an essence
beyond subjectivity) have fascinated me since I first heard about butoh. I do not believe in the possi-
vibration to
bility of touching a pure life. We live in the narratives, images and practices, the disciplined docile
body minds we are in time and space. And yet, when I move with great precision, with full attention,
open up to the
fully present to the movement and its demands, I can feel the limit in myself. The limit is in the invi-
tation, my dance teaches me, it is in a momentary tuning that heightens my attention to the moment
possibility of no-
where I forget the my and the I and this forgotten I immediately pays such close attention to
the images, practices, and histories that pass across that moment. The invitation is the opening that
control in that
forgets the passing of time, the performance, the audience. I forget the connection I feel with my
fellow performers as humans, an I amongst other Is. For short moments at a time, I only feel
highly careful
them, these other ones, as influences on my (or a) moving body. I experience these moments as
freeing islands, refreshing zones of unselfconscious embodied presence. And, at the same time, I
control of the
experience the inflow of images, practices, histories, stories, as the life of theory. I dance the assem-
blage of the Deleuzo-Guattarian moi in space and time. Dancing and writing intertwine.
fibrous pull of
Voice change. The following quote is part of a summary of a 2006 conference paper by Kayo Mikami.
Kayo Mikamis (non-translated) The Body as Vessel: Tatsumi Hijikata was the first book on butoh written
my muscle tissue
by what Sondrah Fraleigh calls an insider to Japanese butoh (Fraleigh 1999: 140). I am including this
summary in this article because it stands for something I cannot access as a non-Japanese reader. Its
the only trace of this work available to me, just like so much butoh exists in translation, trace or ghost. I try to focus
Intriguingly, in this summary, English and Japanese glide and chafe against each other: this text has
traces of an uncanny otherness, a different rhythm, mysteries. I am attracted by the word swindle. on the abstract
The utterances of both Hijikata and Noguchi are such as those spontaneously broadcast when function of
bodily sense is forming; sounds which pre-date onomatopoeia and words. These sounds are

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the pre-verbal body language which evolved before articulated language. Hijikatas language
rejects interpretation as his butoh assumes the appearance of a swindle, in which the subject
plant instead. I
and object are undergoing metamorphosis so rapidly, it swindles even his dancers bodies.
(Mikami 2006)
attempt to not
Swindle my body. My body swindle. My crippled body swindles its way out of its images. Crippling
be enfolded in
interpretation of cripples. My fellow dancer, the Gardener, and I are wheelchair users. The
Gardener, Neil Marcus, has a spastic movement vocabulary and a significant speech difference. I am
the specific, to
large and round, a heavy body on stage, with multiple loci of inflammation at work in my tissues at
any one moment. In different ways, our bodies are read as abnormal on conventional dance stages.
not be I to a
Butoh attracted both of us for this delicious movement, this play between the depth and surface, the
place of metamorphosis and transformation. Butoh allows me to unfold something from minute
Not-I, but to
sites, allows me to layer images, words, myths, flesh and blood.
When performing, my presence smears across the bodily and into what my act enacts. There is
be in both and
enough time between one breath and the next to feel the firing of words in my brain: cripple, blood,
swindle, translation, ghosts. Words dance. And as I repeat my action, and the scene, rehearse for it, I
all places, all
can mine these word/sounds and shape them into coherent thoughts that in turn problematize my
ease in turning. Extreme slowness and rapid metamorphosis grind through me together, gears
the many places
engaging with each other. Cripple. Bare life. These are the two word fires that keep halting my turn,
and even now, as I am writing much of this after the rehearsals and performances have occurred, I
between I and
stop only to make a conscious choice to go on, drawn by a nervous net of connections. A quote
about the cripple is the origin of my fire, the reason I started to explore choreo/graphy, dance and
Not-I
writing, at the site of butoh.

Only when, despite having a normal, healthy body, you come to wish that you were disabled Swindle my
or had been born disabled, do you take your first step in butoh. A person who dances butoh
has just such a fervent desire, much like a childs longing to be crippled. When I see children body. My body
throw sticks and stones at a lame dog trying to slink from sight, then corner it against a wall,
and mindlessly beat it, I feel jealous of the dog. Why? Because it is the dog which derives the swindle. My
most benefit here. It is the dog that tempts the children and, without considering its own
situation, exposes itself completely. crippled body
(Hijikata 2000: 56)
swindles its
There are many connections to be drawn (and all of this fires through me with each minute, ongoing
turning motion in the dance); the cripple of butoh rehearses abjection, a loss of control as essence way out of its
(turn) that I wish to reclaim as a disability culture artist who chafes against negative stereotypes. And

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images. Crippling yet (turn), there is a fascination in me with the strong presence of cripple in (English translations
of) foundational butoh writings.10 The essentialized cripple or the poor injured dog accedes to full
interpretation of immanence, to a presence in time and space untainted by the reflective coding of meaning making.
I am, turning, grasping towards full presence, to just be turning, without these words running
cripples through me, and, at the same time, I protest the use that is made of the dog, and of the cripple, and
the nature of this dragging conflict fuels my desire to make a dance of the butoh cripple.
Pain and cripple these words often emerge as sites for experiences which push people to the
limit. Pain emerges in my dance. Neil Marcus pays for each of our rehearsals with lots of pain, and
he needs long periods in bed in order to prepare and recover. I pop painkillers before and after our
work. None of us two, and few of our co-performers in the various incarnations of Burning, can
perform a few nights in a row. But these things are part of our culture, disability culture, our daily
lives, and there is nothing particularly dangerous or edgy in that for us. The tendency to meta-
phorize, to make disabled people or people in pain represent purity, pre-rational life and exceptional
moments removed from a social sphere, is deeply troubling to those of us who live these lives as
ordinary experiences, manageable and familiar (if not welcomed).
In my dancing turn, I find my attention wandering to the writings on bare life. I feel curiosity
mixed with anger, and I also feel a connection, as do so many other disabled dancers who are fasci-
nated by butoh, often precisely because of this exciting intertwining of the images of disability with
dance.11
I let my dancing mind consciously wander, in some of the longer rehearsals, and all kinds of
terms come into my mind, things German (my mother tongue), Italian, Greek, English. They all
twine around me, like fascia, into wider connections beyond my muscles, toward the muscularity of
expression, as I think through the image of the dog and the cripple in butoh. In The Coming
Community, and based on Walter Benjamins critique of violence, Georgio Agamben discusses the
relationship between zoe and bios bare or minimal life (la vida nuda in Agamben, blosses Leben
in Benjamin, bare life in Agamben translations), and qualified life, life as part of a group. He does
this as a way of pointing to the agency of the state and the opportunities of undoing order. Does
that poor dog undo an order by exposing itself and its torturers? In the state of exception, the rule
becomes visible, and demarcates the boundary of control (while at the same time reasserting that
control). Bare life is the life of the homer sacer, the Roman figure of a condemned man from whom
the state has repealed its protection, who is exiled from the law, and who can be killed without
juridical consequences. By creating a line between inside the system of law and order, and outside,
a political system manifests itself.
Bonnie Sue Stein writes about butoh audiencing that people are drawn in by raw emotions.
She has seen spectators staring with wide eyes, and [] sleeping [] in an escape from the
spectacle rather than boredom. In Japan, especially at Noh drama, a hypnogogic dozing is an

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acceptable way of taking in the performance (Stein 2001: 377). This hypnogogic dozing also happens
to me in the form of small ins and outs of the intensity of my twitching nerves and straining
I am, turning,
muscles. Lying there, I continue to turn, and just as I am all in the small muscle energies of both
holding and moving at the same time, areas of my body screaming, and I am all in the attention to
grasping towards
my fellow dancers energy transferring itself to me, I still also have flashes of Agamben flow over
me, writing fragments. Agamben becomes my dream in this elongation of time, in these seconds
full presence, to
and minutes of the turn. Free-writing after rehearsals and performances, this text accretes from my
memories. I am composing myself, my text, in my performance: my own hypnogogic performance
just be turning,
mode, my self-audiencing, my witnessing. I write, remembering.
Agambens notion of bare life provides an opportunity to speak outside the structure in a state of
without these
exception; it is close to essentialized ways of thinking the supposed authenticity of the body in pain
or at the edge of death, but it is not the same. Bare life is not original, or preceding the state, but is
words running
artificial, emergent in the constitution of the system that demarcates a space within which its func-
tions do not apply the state of exception. This state of exception can, for instance, erase distinc-
through me, and,
tions between public and private (in a Panopticon prison complex) and allow the state full control
over entities (no longer people) in a concentration camp. Importantly, Agamben argues, the state of
at the same time,
exception is no longer dependent on a ritualistic and singular expulsion, but moves closer and closer
to the state of law, tarnishing it, infiltrating it, infecting it, until, in the contemporary world, the
I protest the use
boundaries have become labile, and the system is exposed as violent (still experiencing the stricture
of my choreography here: the immensely slow turn, which means control of my core muscles, which
that is made of
begin to ache, sometimes cramp, during rehearsals).
To follow Agamben: the hunger strikes at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp are the only possi-
the dog, and of
ble expressions that can emanate out of people put into states of exception, whose personhood has
been stripped down to bare life. Communication can only occur through incursion into this flesh,
the cripple, and
bone and blood, i.e. no longer through speech acts. To signal with the life of the body is the only
action open to people in states of exception, and in acting within the state of exception they defy the
the nature of this
universality of the hold of the system, show its limits, but also reassert the systems power (to
delimit). In this formulation, the Foucauldian impasse of how to offer resistance to the system finds
dragging conflict
a painful answer: when the system, the state, is the site of violence in the public eye (as in the
worldwide response to Guantanamo), it loses its legitimacy. I shift, turn imperceptibly to the audi-
fuels my desire to
ences eye, but I feel the muscles pull pull hard sideways in a slight shift. Does butoh expose the
strictures of social regulation? Or does it aestheticize an impulse away from the political?
make a dance of
In butoh, bare life, creaturely life, stands in an interesting relation to these issues of politics, state
power and resistance. Can a state of exception be enacted, ritualistically drawn upon, evoked,
the butoh cripple
embodied? Can the rules of bodily behaviour, the enculturation of the human body, become experi-
ential in their willed absence, their suspension in the durational, painful and sublime bodies of butoh

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Lying there, I (suspension, holding on, muscular tension)? European expressionist dance traditions, one of the
roots from which butoh draws, have often emphasized the ugly, the deformed, and the political
continue to turn, agency of dance. To me, the alliance of this political impetus with the figure of the cripple shifts my
moving body mind, and makes me query the limits of essentialism and metaphor, body words,
and just as I am sound gestures. In butoh a state of exception becomes the threshold for a new expressive force, and
it is at this threshold that the cripple and the beaten dog hold a tenuous, agent-less position. What
all in the small drives my movement? I shift, barely perceivable to myself. Turn.
These thoughts on the politically problematic aspects of turning away from representation and
muscle energies towards (an imaginary) biology, a life measured in muscle and nerve, are not all that is with me in
my position on the floor. Instead, in the many private and group rehearsals for this moment, I
of both holding remember myself in the histories of my embodiment, and sediments of experience float to my atten-
tion when it vibrates away from the experience of tension. My experiences of muscle fibres twitching
and moving at with the exertion of the slow turn, this delicious fully present attention to the mechanics of life, this
narrowing of focus, all map easily on my movement habits when in the grip of pain. I remember
the same time, myself: I put one foot in front of the other, with great deliberation, with a meditative focus charting
each energy arrow that pierces and chafes. I remember myself: I lie in bed and focus on my breath,
areas of my body on the moment, on this expansion of chest happening now. (I rehearse for my pain self in my dance
self in my writing self. Delicious pain.) Meditation and the comfort of rhythm helps to break my
screaming attentions focus on my painful joints, on the non-located generality of inflammation, on my imagi-
native voyage through the pathways and tissues of my body.
The dance is the dance. But what else? Is this dance to me an engagement with pain, devoid of

I shift, turn pain, but with a similarly dispersed energetic attention? Is it an exploration of pains sharpening, a
rehearsal of control-less control, of being with pain?

imperceptibly Vines/threads of perception, Neil Marcus, the Gardener, writes about his experience of our dance
in the weekly writing exercises we share. I am bound and unbound in my dance. Muscle fibres, the

to the audiences fibres of my reading self, they all bind me. I am bound into selfhood through the excitement of
theory, understanding my interdependence viscerally as I respond, minutely, to the gardening hand

eye, but I feel the that hovers over me, Neils hand. Even now, reflecting on my dance, I want to engage in this dance
again, an addict to the newness of the tangle of vines that emerges in the energy fields of different

muscles presences within and without my moving body. I feel as if I clear the field towards a new grounding.
And yet, in the way I understand butoh as a choreographic practice, the presence of cripple

pull pull hard never leaves my perception fully. In immanence, I reclaim the presence of pain as presence: mix it
with the always-present representational history of pain. The membranes between concepts shift as

sideways in a I dance, reflect, stem against narratives and metaphors, and yet invite narratives of political inter-
vention, metaphors of growth. To disarticulate these contrasting movements is impossible, but my
dancing body mind can hold on to all of them, in the complexity of movement as an embodied,

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reflexive, communal and individual act. This is the horizon of this butoh dance of body and words:
an acknowledgment of complexity that nourishes itself from multiple knowledges and perspectives. slight shift. Does
My dance, touching bodies to words, becomes my choreographed politics.
butoh expose the
Photo credits strictures of social
regulation? Or
Production stills from the Olimpias production water burns sun, a dance video which emerged from
the Burning research. Photographer: Keira Heu-Jwyn Chang, dancers: Neil Marcus, Mayuko Ayabe,

does it aestheticize
Eboni Hawkins, director: Petra Kuppers.
Research rehearsal photo (p. 85): dancers Neil Marcus, Christina Braun, Petra Kuppers.

an impulse
Photo: Kelly Rafferty.

References
Agamben, Giorgio (1993), The Coming Community (trans. Michael Hardt), Minneapolis: University
away from the
of Minnesota Press.
Amagasaki, Akira (1996), Reinventing the Body, UNESCO Courier, January, 49: 1, n. p.
political?
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (trans.
Brian Massumi), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. I remember
myself: I put one
DOrazi, Maria Pia (1997), La Nouva Danza Giapponese/Translation: The New Japanese Dance, Roma:
Editori Associati, pp. 208209.
DOrazi, Maria Pia (2001), Body of Light: The Way of the But Performer, in Scholz-Cionca and Samuel
Leiter (eds), Japanese Theatre and the International Stage, Leiden, Boston, Cologne: Brill, p. 340. foot in front of
Felciano, Rita (2003), Festival brings International Butoh to San Francisco, Billboard, 6: 115,
pp. 3035.
the other, with
Fraleigh, Sondra Horton (1999), Dancing into Darkness: Butoh, Zen, and Japan, Pittsburgh: University
of Pittsburgh Press and Dance Books.
great deliberation,
Hay, Deborah (2000), My Body The Buddhist, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. with a meditative
Hijikata, Tatsumi (1985), To My Comrade Programme Notes of Niwa by Natsu Nakajima (trans.
Natsu Nakajima and Lizzie Slater). focus charting each
Hijikata, Tatsumi and Nanako, Kurihara (2000), From Being Jealous of a Dogs Vein, TDR: The
Drama Review, 44: 1, pp. 5659.
energy arrow that
Iwana, Masaki (2002), The Dance and Thoughts of Masaki Iwana, Tokyo: Butoh Kenkyuu-jo Hakutou-kan. pierces and chafes.
Klein, Susan (1988), Ankoku Buto, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, East Asia Series.

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 Butoh Rhizome: Choreography of a moving writing self

My dance, Manning, Erin (2007), The Politics of Touch, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
Sas, Miryam (1999), Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism, Stanford: Stanford
touching bodies to University Press.

words, becomes
Stein, Bonnie Sue (2001), Butoh: Twenty Years Ago We Were Crazy, Dirty, and Mad, in Ann Dils
and Ann Cooper Albright, Moving History/Dancing Cultures. A Dance History Reader, Middletown:

my choreographed
Wesleyan University Press, pp. 376383.

politics Suggested citation

Kuppers, P. (2010), Butoh Rhizome: Choreography of a moving writing self, Choreographic
Practices 1, pp. 7996, doi: 10.1386/chor.1.79_1

Contributor details
Petra Kuppers teaches Performance Studies at the University of Michigan. The scar of visibility: Medical
Performances and Contemporary Art (Minnesota, 2007) and Community Performance: An introduction
(Routledge, 2007), Disability Culture and Community and Performance: Find a Strange and Twisted Shape
(Palgrave, 2011). She is also artistic director of The Olimpias: www.olimpias.org.
Contact: 2550 Dana Street, Apt 8FG, Berkeley, CA 94704, USA.
E-mail: petra@umich.edu

Notes
1. The Olimpias is an artists collective focused on disability culture work and performance research. Its name derives from
Hoffmanns Sandman novella, in which the artificial dancing woman Olimpia becomes both projection surface and object of
desire for the men in the story. In The Olimpias, we claim agency while acknowledging the power cultural projections have.

2. A superficial link butoh is often conceived as being anti-traditional, and citing Noh specialists in the context of butoh is risky.

3. See, for instance, Felciano 2003. Within Japan itself, the movement/form offers other origin narratives, too, see for instance
Susan Klein who describes how Japanese artists articulated a peripheral Japanese essence as intervening into the newly
developing state (1988).

4. Eiko and Koma are former company members of Tatsumi Hijikata, collaborators with Kazuo Ohno, and also identify as
students of Manja Chmiel, someone who herself studies with Mary Wigman.
5. Today, but is a common label for naming many different artists. Thus someone even has made this radical assertion:
But does not exist and has never existed anywhere (DOrazi 1997: 208209).

6. See for instance this interview between a butoh master and a literary critic, conducted in 1968, and reprinted in 2000 in a
highly influential special issue on butoh in TDR. Here, a specific anti-female framing is set up which is then undercut by the
evasive and destabilizing poetry of Hijikatas writings (who did work with women post-1968).

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Shibusawa: Its what Haniya Yutaka has cleverly termed meditation in the womb. Which reminds me, all the dancers
in your dance of darkness are men. Are women, then, too fleshy and round for it?

Hijikata: A dancer must be able to relate to, for example, a frozen bone that transcends gender.
(Hijikata 2000: 51)

7. This draw towards becoming, and becoming other, as part of a historical narrative on the emergence of butoh, is well encapsu-
lated by Miryam Sas in her closing remarks in her book on Japanese surrealism:

This fascination, this longing for the encounter with what is the barest edge of possibility (the longing for crisis), like the
longing in early twentieth-century Japanese poetry for the encounter with actuality, has the structure in these post-war
movements of a desire performed and incorporated in the physical movements of the dance, which is its experimental trial
and both can and cannot grasp the object of its longing.
(Sas 1999: 176)

8. These places of seduction by dance and writing simultaneously fuel explorations like Erin Mannings work Tango and touch
(2007), which argues for an ethics of touch in movement.

9. With this statement, I am already at odds with some Japanese practitioners. How exactly this moment of habitation is to
happen is a point of contention, and whether there is possession or not, or a radical openness of the body to itself and to
its histories, or to a zeitgeist, an atmosphere, captured on the taunt strings of muscular attention: this is the realm in which
an individual dancer has to find her place. Maria Pia DOrazi writes about Iwana remembering no (or Ohno) in relation
to this issue of possession (issues of translation are also at the forefront in this quotations dance between Japanese, Italian
and English languages): When he says that, observing the cranes for a long time his body becomes a crane, he accepted
the crane in its concept. But it never means that he performs like a real crane. He always performs about himself (DOrazi
2001: 340, quoting Iwana Masaki, The Way of Butoh, Tsubushi Journal, 2: WinterSpring).

10. And Hijikatas students take up the language too (although what exactly these words mean in Japanese disabled/crippled/
handicapped what they signifed in the original interviews, what was said, seems impossible to trace: the cripple is slippery,
like the transnational history of butoh language). Yoko Ashikawa is an early student of Hijikata, and she explained to Sondra
Fraleigh:

Start with the viewpoint that you are handicapped, she advises in terms of dancing. [I wonder: what does this mean?
Handicapped in terms of dancing? Is this the handicapped of the horse race, or is it developmentally disabled? My
monkey mind chases around, casting for different meanings.] For me this means adopting the existential attitude of
not knowing, to be open to whatever comes, or attaining what is called in Zen a beginners mind.
(Fraleigh 1999: 141)

11. Disabled dancers who use butoh-inspired forms include: Erik Ferguson and Yulia Arakelyan in Portland, Oregon; Manri
Kim, director of the company Taihen in Japan; the Bay Areas AXIS dance company in their 2010 collaboration with Shinichi
Iova-Kogas inkBoat; Theater Thikwas collaboration with Minako Seki and Erika Matsunami; and many more.

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