Butoh and Embodied Transformation

The Japanese avant-garde dance form butoh, founded by Hijikata Tatsumi in the late 1950s, is known for its marked physicality. The choreographic methodology of butoh, however, is not focused primarily on instructing the dancers how to move their bodies. Instead, the dancers work with verbal and mental imagery to transform into butoh-tai, the “butoh body,” a special form of embodiment from which the dance is thought to unfold as its external manifestation. I propose that this is an aesthetic process that can be explained by a combination of theories from empirical and philosophical aesthetics, about empathy, embodied simulation, and the body schema. These theories, which hypothesize an inner, neural body at work in the aesthetic experience, shed light both on the crucial role of imagination in butoh, and on a potential for transformation inherent in the aesthetic experience per se.