Fabulating the Japanese Body Inside and Beyond Performance and Choreography Through Butoh

Abstract

In this article, I question the genesis of the self one perceives as such, by approaching the creative process of the performance Pele, which, through movement, video and text, operates a continued matching of apparently opposing elements such as inside and outside of the body, I and other, body and mind, individual and collective. I describe how recent Butoh training experiences have offered as a pathway for achieving a corporeal state of connectedness. Based on the procedural non-dualistic theory proposed Christine Greiner in Fabulations of the Japanese Body and its micro-activisms, the aim not to erase nor solve the tensions deriving from these encounters, but to give way to these questionings and consequent agitation, maintaining the diversities alive, in a state of quasi-balance.