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Chapter Three Is Butoh a Philosophy? Quantum mechanics describes a reality in which things sometimes hover in a haze of being partly one way and partly another. Things become definite only when a suitable observation forces them to relinquish quantum possibility and settle on a specific outcome. —Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos Hijikata Tatsumi said butoh was not a philosophy but that “someday it might be.”1 The previous chapter has already pursued some philosophical questions concerning morphology, how the body is conceived and presented in butoh, especially its nondualistic basis. We also considered the bodily lived ambiguity of butoh, its unfinished and vulnerable aspects. Here we ask whether butoh is a philosophy or if one can be discovered in it? To answer this, we need to continue to develop themes from the previous chapter, but in a philosophical context. Dance Philosophies and Butoh I believe there are philosophies implicit in dance forms if we take the time to study and uncover them. Once we understand what principles underlie a dance form, we can further analyze and develop these, and we can also relate these to the historical time frame of their unique development. For instance, classical ballet represents the balance and proportion of the golden mean of classical architecture, originating in ancient Greece and Rome. Ballet began in the Renaissance revival of Greek and Roman themes amid grandiose celebrations meant to consolidate the wealth and power of the ruling elite.2 It continued to develop within the aristocratic courts and theaters of Europe for several hundred years, eventually evolving a codified classical technique, its well-defined practices spreading out internationally. The balanced proportions of classical architecture characterize the geometric mathematics of ballet technique, even as ballet cho- 64 Alchemy and Morphology reographers can and do suspend the classical technique for specific purposes. It would be difficult to say that ballet represents classical philosophy, but it is easy to see that it does exhibit a classical context. Ballet has a formal enduring basis as opposed to a relativist and changing essence. In stark contrast, the historic modern dance in America and Europe (including German Expressionism) represents an existentialist philosophy and approach to life that has individualism at its core. In this view, there is no objective enduring guide, certainly not ideals of balance and proportion. Individual expression, a radical creativity as poured through aesthetic visions, guided the discoveries of modern dance and eventually modernized ballet as well. Butoh lies outside the modernist enterprise, however, developing first as a protest against modernity, as we have explored. If classical ballet exhibits a classical context and modern dance an existential one, how does butoh diverge from these? I hold that butoh can be explained through metamorphosis, that it has a metamorphic context proffering a unique understanding of the dancing body and that it promotes community and healing over the importance of the individual. Butoh shares an existentialist link with modern dance, however, because both rest on an understanding of the body that questions linear rationality and absolute knowledge. Not knowing is the compassionate quantum space in consciousness of the existentialist vision and the weak body images of Hijikata. This ethos compels the community-centered workshops of Harada Nobuo: waiting, not knowing how to move at the beginning , as I experienced in teaching a workshop with him in Fukuoka, Japan, in 2005. Trust of intuition and whole-body consciousness in modern/postmodern dance also presupposes a specific kind of lack. This is indeed the starting place for experiment, exploration, and discovery in all art. Creativity through individual discovery rather than established codified techniques has been central to the context of modern/postmodern dance. Throughout the twentieth century, dance developed with increasing respect for postulates of Freudian subconscious life and, later, the collective unconscious explained by Carl Jung. Martha Graham explored these extensively, as did many other choreographers. The psychological relativity of “not knowing” allowed quantum leaps toward new dance forms. The quantum lack that butoh displays is unique. Hijikata put the perspective of butoh well in a letter written in 1984 to his student Nakajima Natsu two years before his death, presenting his picture of the “hidden subconscious” and its tie to “the collective unconscious body” that he calls “our body.” This letter has a Buddhist ring toward the end: We shake hands with the dead, who send us encouragement from beyond our body, this is the unlimited power of Butoh. In our body history, something is hiding in our subconscious, collected...

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