Bodily Imagination in Butoh Dance

This book offers an anthropological study of butoh dance as an artistic somatic practice which can be oriented toward self-knowledge and transformation as pathways to creativity and healing. Based on immersive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Japan and the UK, it reflects on the use of butoh as a tool for creative expression but also to engage with the daily question of what it is be alive. The book examines butoh practitioners’ notions and experiences of dancing vis-à-vis the author’s own creative inquiries as an anthropologist-cum-butoh practitioner. Paola Esposito argues that, through the intertwining of sensory perception and imagination, butoh practice can be an art of inquiry into one’s lived body. Detailing elements of training and performance through an ‘anthropology with art’ approach, the volume highlights distinctive modalities of ‘thinking in movement’ through butoh as mediated by techniques that support the exploration of mimetic and metamorphic potentialities of the human body.