The Routledge Companion to Dance Studies

Helen Thomas, Stacey Prickett, Helen Thomas, Stacey Prickett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781315306537
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

The Routledge Companion to Dance Studies maps out the key features of dance studies as the field stands today, while pointing to potential future developments.

It locates these features both historically—within dance in particular social and cultural contexts—and in relation to other academic influences that have impinged on dance studies as a discipline. The editors use a thematically based approach that emphasizes that dance scholarship does not stand alone as a single entity, but is inevitably linked to other related fields, debates, and concerns. Authors from across continents have contributed chapters based on theoretical, methodological, ethnographic, and practice-based case studies, bringing together a wealth of expertise and insight to offer a study that is in-depth and wide-ranging.

Ideal for scholars and upper-level students of dance and performance studies, The Routledge Companion to Dance Studies challenges the reader to expand their knowledge of this vibrant, exciting interdisciplinary field.

PART I

Dance and corporeality: Training and engagement

1

DANCING THE SPACE

Butoh and Body Weather as training for ecological consciousness

Rosemary Candelario

Introduction

Japanese experimental dancer Min Tanaka famously said, “I don’t dance in the space, I dance the space” (Candelario 2018, 45). The statement’s removal of a preposition, just two small letters, results in a profound reordering of the relationship between bodies and spaces that has both philosophical and ecological implications: philosophical in the sense that Tanaka proposes both a theory and practice of dancing that requires a new conception of how dancing connects bodies and space, and ecological because I believe the application of this theory and practice beyond dance training and performance could affect discursive and perhaps even day-to-day shifts in how humans relate to their environment. This chapter asks: How can we understand what it means to dance the space? How does one learn to dance the space? What are the implications of this kind of practice on how we understand space and our relationship to it? Can dance training actually double as training for developing an alternative relationship between humans and their environment? As a way of addressing these questions, I discuss my ethnographic research at two dance training workshops: SU-EN’s Butoh Summer Camp in wooded rural Sweden in 2015 and Frank van de Ven’s Body Weather-based Body/Landscape workshop in the mountains of the Basque Country in 2013.

This chapter begins with an orientation to butoh and Body Weather, and then brings ideas from dance, ecology, and posthumanist philosophy together to articulate how these dance practices can facilitate what Ann Cooper Albright (2003) calls an “ecological consciousness.” The two training programs are then described in detail, including their understanding of the body, and exercises used to train the body to shift out of habitual patterns and into new orientations with the space. Finally, the two practices are compared and contrasted in order to point to how each of these forms trains people to dance the space. This chapter takes as a given that it is possible (and indeed necessary, urgent) to teach, learn, and practice dance techniques that can shift one’s relationship to the environment, from body-subject to just another object in what Timothy Morton (2013) calls “the mesh.” What’s more, it takes an idealistic stance that butoh and Body Weather training practice have the potential to have a direct impact, not just a mimetic or representative one, on behaviors integral to this shift. In an era of accelerating climate change, this kind of work, which is at once both material and philosophical, takes on a particular urgency. My hope is that eventually this research on butoh and Body Weather training methods could illuminate, as Wendy Arons and Theresa J. May (2012, 6) have stated, not only “how performance has or might function as part of the transvaluation of values necessary to forestall ecological collapse,” but also how these dance training programs could function beyond the trainings themselves as part of the transformation of behaviors necessary to forestall ecological collapse.

Butoh, Body Weather, training

Butoh is an avant-garde dance developed in Japan in the late 1950s and 1960s by a group of dancers centered on Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno. Butoh features an image-based approach to generating movement, an emphasis on the transformation of the dancer into something else, an intense physicality that may result in explosions of movement across the stage or a strictly contained tension beneath the surface of the skin, and a focus on themes such as death, marginality, and nature (Baird and Candelario 2018). Close associations between butoh and specific sites can be traced to Hijikata’s project with photographer Eikoh Hosoe (1965–1968) in the northern region of Japan, Tohoku, where Hijikata grew up and Hosoe took refuge as a child during the bombing of Tokyo. Inspired by the work with Hosoe (which was published as the book Kamaitachi in 1968), Hijikata mined memories and images of Tohoku to create new choreographic ideas and movement vocabulary, a project that consumed him until his death in 1986. Although Hijikata was far more interested in the idea of Tohoku than the material landscape, the strong association that ensued between butoh and site has since inspired butoh dancers to develop companies and practices in relation to their own local native or adopted landscapes. The form is now often taught and performed outdoors, in addition to being performed on stages, and has been adapted to many different landscapes all over the world.

Min Tanaka started leading Body Weather workshops in 1978. Body Weather, Tanaka insists, is not a dance style, but rather an ideology for dance and life and a methodology for bodily research. Body Weather is centered on the exploration of the body’s landscape in the context of the larger environment, in which “bodies are not conceived as fixed entities, but just like the weather, [are] constantly changing through an infinite and complex system of processes occurring in- and outside of these bodies” (Body Weather Amsterdam n.d.). Zack Fuller (2012) describes Body Weather as “research, a way of acquiring information, experience, and stimulation from the physical environment.” Nature images like wind and clay, and an orientation to site (whether that site is an urban street, a suburban park, a dance studio, or a wooded rural setting), are considered important sources of stimulation for training and performance. From 1986 to 2010, Tanaka hosted Maijuku Performance Company members and students on his Body Weather Farm in Hakushu, Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan. The working organic vegetable farm not only sustained Tanaka and the company, but also—and perhaps more importantly—served as a central focus of training. That is, agricultural labor was considered an inherent part of dance training through information gained by the body from the physical environment.

I should emphasize that many Body Weather practitioners, including Tanaka himself, currently sharply distinguish their work from butoh (although this has not always been the case). Tanaka did work with Hijikata for a few years before Hijikata died in 1986, but already had a substantial body of experimental, improvisational, and site work to his credit before that time. While Body Weather practitioners typically hold Hijikata in high esteem, they find butoh to be a fixed entity that does not allow the kind of open-ended experimentation that they want to pursue. Nonetheless, as a practitioner of both butoh and Body Weather, and as a scholar, I find it to be productive to include practices on the margins of butoh in the discussion.

Butoh is certainly not the only dance form being used to explore these issues. I focus on butoh and butoh-related forms such as Body Weather here, first and foremost, because that is my background as a performer and my expertise as a scholar. However, there are two other reasons why butoh and Body Weather practices offer such a rich field in which to investigate dancing the space. First, although there is an active debate about what constitutes contemporary butoh, the one thing people agree on is that butoh and butoh-related dance is fundamentally about the transformation of the dancing body into something else (see, e.g., Baird and Candelario 2018; Fraleigh 2010). Second, many training workshops not only situate themselves in nature but also explicitly present the workshop as a way to understand or form a relationship with that particular landscape. I want to take the claims of these practices seriously as potential modes for transforming humans and forming relationships with the environment.

Although the focus is on dance training here, the central point is not dance pedagogy or how the dance is taught, but on what the training produces. Whereas performance is often about spectatorship and representation, training is about participation and learning how to do something. Attention to training rather than performance, I propose, opens up a focus on learning and repeating behaviors that require us to act differently, not only in the specific locales of the trainings, but potentially also on a larger scale in relation to our global climate. These training programs neither engage the environment as a backdrop for dance, such as in site-specific dance, nor as an aesthetic object in its own right, as in land art, nor as a theme about which to dance. Instead, they develop in their participants processes aimed at developing a set of complex interconnections between body and space. If and when performance is included as a component of these workshops, the focus is on sharing the processes and experiences with witnesses in the place where those processes were honed. The interconnections learned through dancing, which I conceptualize here through philosopher Morton’s (2013) related concepts of interobjectivity and the mesh, force us to question our assumptions about the relationship between bodies and space, and remind us that we are not and cannot be isolated from our surroundings.

Bodies, space, and dance: “Facilitating an ecological consciousness”

In the German modern dance of Mary Wigman and Rudolf von Laban, which served as a foundation for modern dance in Japan as well as butoh (Elswit et al. 2018), space acted on bodies, while at the same time bodies moved through space. Space was volumetric, providing a “Raumempfindung or ‘felt’” experience (Brown 2010, 60). In this context, there was a clear distinction between inside (the body, the emotions) and outside (space). Much of this modern dance sought to project the inside to the (transcendent) outside. In this view there is a clear separation between a body and the space through which it moves.

Radical changes to conceptions of space and time in postmodernity (see, e.g., Harvey 1990) have been accompanied by a concomitant shift in the relationship of choreography to space. Influenced in part by Deleuzian thought, spatial practices now tend more to the post-Euclidian. Instead of a simple inside-outside dichotomy, what we now see is more like a Möbius strip, an “enfolding [of] inside and outside . . . [in which] the body is both ‘contaminated’ and ‘contaminant,’ erupting and displacing borders between soma and city, the organic body and the built environment, corporeality and virtuality, container and contents” (Brown 2010, 61). In other words, rather than remaining separate, dancing bodies and space have developed an interpenetrative relationship in which neat borders are no longer distinguishable. In the case of butoh, Hijikata was already choreographing a body without organs of sorts (via Artaud) well before Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari wrote their book A Thousand Plateaus (1980); Deleuze and Guattari themselves were interested in butoh for its body assemblages and nonhuman becomings, the former largely through his student, and later translator, Kuniichi Uno, and the latter directly as evidenced in his writing about butoh and Tanaka (Guattari 2015). (In addition, numerous scholars bring Deleuze and Guattari to bear on butoh and vice versa: Cull 2012 and Hornblow 2006 are but two examples.)

Albright’s description of her approach to teaching dance improvisation in a university setting is one example of the potential political implications of a kind of Deleuzian or post-Euclidian understanding of the relationship between bodies and space. She writes:

I ask [students] to concentrate on opening the pores of their skin so that the world can penetrate their physical awareness. This image helps us feel our bodies as part and parcel of a whole landscape, rather than the instrument that views, arranges, or destroys that landscape. I have, at times, described this somatic moment as facilitating an ecological consciousness: in this dialogue between the self and the world one becomes aware of the intriguing possibilities of interdependence. With this comes a deeper sense of responsibility, not as an oppressive duty towards others, but rather as an ability to respond, an ability to be present with the world as a way of being present with oneself. (Albright 2003, 262)

Crucial here is the shift from the kind of interpenetrative relationship described above (acknowledging a mutual impact) to an interdependent one (acknowledging a mutual responsibility). It is key, too, that Albright highlights not only the shift in being in relationship with the world, but also, by repeating the word “ability,” she draws our attention to particular skills that dancing can develop: responsiveness, presence, and seeing (and therefore perhaps treating) the world as inextricable from oneself. The kind of relationship Albright describes has the potential to undo the anthropocentrism inherent in discourses such as the Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000), which identifies the current geologic era as one defined by human impact on the environment and climate.

The development of critical posthumanism has been essential to shifting notions of relationships of bodies and space(s) away from a human-centered understanding of the world and toward the kind of interdependent mutuality Albright aims to teach. While some scholars focus on decentering humans in favor of seeing them as part of the larger web of life on the planet (see, e.g., Badmington 2000; Wolfe 2009; Braidotti 2013), others seek to broaden the scope even further to consider nonhuman objects and their relationships to one another (see, e.g., Bennett 2010; Bogost 2012; Harman 2018). Morton, who belongs in the second category, provides a helpful way to understand this kind of newly ordered web of interconnectivity through Object-Oriented Ontology. He writes, “The phenomenon we call intersubjectivity is just a local anthropocentric instance of a much more widespread phenomenon, namely interobjectivity . . . ‘intersubjectivity’ is really human interobjectivity with lines drawn around it to exclude nonhumans” (2013, 81–82). Like the simple but profound change Tanaka effects in his statement that opens this chapter, the substitution of “ob” for “sub” in Morton’s writing effects a profound reordering of the world. Gone are the body-subjects of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964) with special status over and above objects that have been so dominant over the past half century. Instead, we are all objects: my body, the chair in which I sit, the computer on which I type, my cat sleeping on the couch a few meters from me, the house in which I write, my partner sitting in the next room, the street on which I live, even the weather system that yesterday delivered massive thunderstorms and today bathes my town in cooler temperatures and warm sunlight. Interobjectivity is the spacetime between and among these objects. In the sense of quantum physics, spacetime is four dimensional—the three dimensions of space plus time; it is not static but dynamic, responding to hyperobjects. The classic example is how a planet displaces spacetime, which is experienced by other objects as gravity. For Morton, interobjectivity—a way to describe the relationships among all objects, including humans—does not exist in spacetime, rather, it is spacetime, or rather, spacetime is interobjectivity. Just as Tanaka removes the “in” in order to dance the space, Morton removes the “in” in order to establish that the relationship among objects—the quantum, the planetary, and the mundane—is nothing less than the dynamic responsiveness of spacetime.

An interobjective system (me, my cat, my house and my neighbors’ houses, the trees in the yard, the asphalt street, the weather system sitting over North Texas) is an example of what Morton calls “the mesh.” The mesh resonates with the Japanese concept of ma. Ma is not simply space or the space of the body, but more prop...