In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Embodied Histories and Overlapping Memories in the Body
  • Peter Eckersall (bio)

History is always connected to butoh but not in any way that we might easily understand. In 1960s Japan, butoh artists were often trying to interrupt history as if they struggled to prevent the seeming inevitability of capitalist dystopia seeping through the everyday memories of war. Writing during the turbulent 1960s, also a time of radical artistic practice, the butoh pioneer Hijikata Tatsumi said that his work was "human rehabilitation, which goes today by the name of dancer."1

The 1960s generally was a time when "direct action" [chokusetsu kôdô] was a goal that brought artists and radical student protestors into the same circles of embodied politics. Historian and former activist Suga Hidemi calls this a dynamic corporeal vision of culture [bunka ni taisuru doutai shiryoku] designed to smash orthodoxy.2 History was swallowed in the sense that to immerse oneself in an experience of action and mixing things up was definitely a sixties thing. But spitting also came into its own.

Now even the memory of a radical past has faded and our embodied experiences of the everyday world are very different, but some [End Page 74] links remain. In fact, by taking us into experiences that might echo the past, performance itself is an effective way to express the crossover from the medium of history into the body. This is done as a dramaturgy of sensation, referents, and showing the expressive pathways of an idea into practice.

In the "Swallowing and Spitting History Symposium," the three artist presentations did this in different ways.

Miya Masaoka showed a work called Vagina Dialogues that consisted of chairs transmitting sound as vibration and evoking physical stimulation as the act of listening. The title of the work is a play on Eve Ensler's popular performance text The Vagina Monologues (1996) that gives voice to women's experiences of sexual desire, relationships, and violence. Ensler's verbatim-style text is usually performed by a celebrity female actor. In contrast, Masaoka's work showed how a feminist-Artaudian sensory approach to these themes might directly affect the body. As the artist explained, the vagina "listens" and becomes a way of activating the sensorium.

Brooke O'Harra, cofounder of the Theater of a Two-headed Calf, showed scenes from the company's "kabuki-punk" adaptation of Chikamatsu's Drum of the Waves of Horikawa, a story of adultery and vengeance written in 1707. In the Two-headed Calf version, the inspiration of kabuki as something verging into exaggeration and melodrama was explored. The company took the kata, the proscribed character-based movements of kabuki, as a basis for making their own uniquely queer and exaggerated physicality that was intended as an expressive politics of radical selfhood.

Finally, Eiko Otake's lecture-performance, "Swallowing and Spitting History"—that also lent its name to the event—gave us a good sense of what the contemporary embodied moment of protest and performance might involve. Her ongoing performance against the loss of memory of the conflation that is Fukushima that she showed documentation from is a kind of rehabilitation project. In her presentation, she moved around the space while moving a projection of her work—constantly interweaving these two performances and shifting our viewpoints while making spectators embodied agents in the work, both live and remediated at the same time. I think of the idea of witness and the performance of mourning, but Otake's presentation is more activist, interventionist, and humorous. Even given the serious business of addressing memories of the dead, there is a profound joy in her work. Otake marks place with an artistic presence in a way that recalls the idea of slow dramaturgy: a performance that foregrounds "ecologic-material dramaturgical intensities … towards slowness, ambience and connectivity."3

I relate this to butoh, especially in the sense of there being an aspect of butoh that gives attention to the environment. Butoh is not an eco-critical movement in a direct sense, but its processes that explore alternate states of [End Page 75] corporeality and extending sensory awareness into the environment are a good foundation for thinking about artistic practice and ecology. A...

pdf

Share