Dancing with Dionysus

Abstract

Our bodies are the very centre of our earthly being. They are essentially alive before being recognised, and they remain creatively alive while we use them, despite our attempt to control them. Furthermore, in addition to being our bodies – or so we think – they are intrinsically connected to the earth: they have a past in which the memories of the earth are sedimented and disseminated, a present in which such memories subsist alongside newly acquired sensations and images, and a future into which that living legacy will be projected and enriched. Re-experiencing our living body amounts to being born not twice but many times – hence to a Dionysian experience. Butō dance is an exceptional vehicle for it: as a free exploration of the transformative qualities of movement and of its abyssal, Posidonian roots, it allows us to silently sense our earthly body and, thereby, to re-position ourselves otherwise in our aliveness. In this respect, butō differs from ballet or classical dance, which aims instead at subjecting the movements of the body to extrinsic aesthetic purposes. Yet, it also differs from contemporary dance, which, like butō, rejects the virtuosic and narrative features traditionally associated with dance as a spectacle, and lets things flow in improvisation, but which, unlike butō, tends to explore movement as such, without necessarily diving into the existential depths of our “living body.” For, in butō, the dead metamorphose into the living, and the living metamorphose into the dead; sensations change into psychic images, images change into sensations, and both change into forms; anything solid becomes fluid, the ethereal becomes dense, and forms and events exchange their roles. Like Dionysus’s, butō’s is a metamorphic domain that changes all the time in all its dimensions. Butō can also be described as an animist domain in which the question: “How many times can we be reborn to life, or how many times can life itself be reborn in us?” finds a powerful answer: “as many times and in as many ways as the body proves capable of sensing afresh and of undertaking life’s many natures and assuming the reversibility of their corresponding perspectives.” Historically, butō was born in the avant-garde theatrical scene of post-World-War-II Japan, at the crossroads of a number of intellectual and artistic influences that can be distributed along six thematic axes. First, the international performative avant-garde, which had been introduced in Japan by dancers like Ishii, Takaya, and Itō. Second, Mishima’s defiant appropriation of Nietzschean nihilism against the Westernisation of Japanese culture. Third, Bataille’s subversive flirt with outrage, excess, and death-obsession. Fourth, Genet’s crypto-Christian exaltation of suffering and vindication of amorality and violence as a path to sanctification. Fifth, Artaud’s and Genet’s shared understanding of theatre as an inverted mass whose purpose is to exorcise evil by granting the unconscious free expression. Sixth, Artaud’s notion of a “body without organs,” non-functional and thus capable of connecting itself to the cosmos through all its pores. Butō’s founder, Tatsumi Hijikata, merged these influences and created butō in collaboration with Kazuo Ōno, a second-generation disciple of Eguchi who defined butō, for his part, as a realm of poetry which gravitates around life’s celebration. Over the years, some butō performers, including Hijikata’s early collaborators Ashikawa and Tanaka, have developed butō in a direction similar to Ōno’s, and hence different from Hijikata’s, by centring their dance on the exploration of the body as a dynamic intersection of nature’s living forces. In a time like ours in which it is imperative to rethink the relationship between life and non-life against the backdrop of an unprecedented ecological devastation, butō dance proves especially relevant. Drawing freely on Lacan, butō can be seen as an embodied practice that allows us to re-enter the “Real” beyond the “Symbolic” and the “Imaginary.” In addition, butō practice can be described as a centre of conceptual vibrations where key notions of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy (e.g., “pre-individual,” “molecular,” “rhizome” “singularity,” “smooth space,” “machinic unconscious,” etc.) find a persistent echo, and where many of the conceptual and aesthetic certainties that contemporary performance works with (including the stress on flux and the exploration of liminality) resonate as well.