What is the generative potential of butoh, a cluster of performative practices that began as radical a half-century ago in Japan and now performed by thousands of practitioners worldwide? Do core principles remain that may yet be employed to engender new approaches that build upon butoh's practical foundations and are appropriate for contemporary social urgencies in the early 21st Century? If crisis is the fundamental concept around which butoh practices revolve, can a butoh-based discourse inform modes of crisis resolution in other arenas such as health, environment, economy, or politics?
Butoh was originally framed by oppositional binaries defined by essentialized Japanese and Western cultural identities and a social imaginary inspired by dark tales of butoh founder Hijikata Tatsumi's allegedly rural childhood in northern Japan. We may now view this as a paradigmatic frame for activating what Hijikata called the body in crisis to instigate social thought and crisis resolution and thereby inspire individuals, groups, communities, or society at large. I frame butoh, therefore, as a process of subjectively engaging, embodying, and expressing chaos, contradiction, and crisis for the purpose of psycho-physiological and/or psycho-social resolution and transformation.
In this dissertation, I begin with elements of postwar Japanese art and culture from which butoh drew inspiration to become a recursive socio-political practice rooted in subjectively imagined embodiments. I then redefine and recontextualize butoh's core principles in the context of the theoretical constructs of desire, trickster, and the cultural commons. I conclude by applying this theory to contemporary discourses of democracy and sustainability in terms of performative, interpersonal, and intercultural behavior.
