UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations

UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title An Empty Room: Butoh Performance and the Social Body in Crisis Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8xq5x42n Author Sakamoto, Michael Andrew Yoshinobu Publication Date 2012 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles An Empty Room: Butoh Performance and the Social Body in Crisis A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Culture and Performance by Michael Andrew Y. Sakamoto 2012 © Copyright by Michael Andrew Y. Sakamoto 2012 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION An Empty Room: Butoh Performance and the Social Body in Crisis by Michael Andrew Y. Sakamoto Doctor of Philosophy in Culture and Performance University of California, Los Angeles, 2012 Professor Allen F. Roberts, Chair 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 ii 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. iii The dissertation of Michael Andrew Y. Sakamoto is approved. Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei Peter Sellars Donald John Cosentino Allen Fraleigh Roberts, Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2012 iv Table of Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements Biography Introduction: (My) Butoh Chapter 1: Developing a Practice Chapter 2: Imagined Innocence Lost Chapter 3: An Empty Room Chapter 4: Desire Chapter 5: Trickster Chapter 6: In the Soil: The Cultural Commons, Democracy, and Sustainability Bibliography v List of Figures Figure Page Description 1 127 Self-portrait in dressing room, Kyoto, Japan, 2010. (Photo: Michael Sakamoto) 2 129 Cyclo driver, Saigon, 2005. (Photo: Michael Sakamoto) 3 130 Spirit medium, Chiang Mai, Thailand, 2010 (Photo: Michael Sakamoto) 4 240 Waewdao Sirisook in “Soil”, 2012 (Photos: JaNelle Weatherford) 5 254 Nguyen Nguyen in “Soil”, 2012 (Photos: Michael Sakamoto and JaNelle Weatherford) vi Acknowledgements My heartfelt gratitude goes out first and foremost to my wife, Waewdao Sirisook, for her eternal support, and my dissertation chair and advisor for many years, Allen F. Roberts, who has remained steadfastly loyal and endlessly insightful around my interdisciplinary practice, research, and project, even when I myself was not necessarily clear on what I was attempting. Great thanks to my other committee members, Donald Cosentino, Peter Sellars, and Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, each of whom in their unique manner taught me invaluable lessons in both the embodiment of scholarship and the inherent intellect of the body. Additionally, thanks to the many professors who strongly supported me throughout my graduate career, especially Mary Nooter Roberts, David Rousseve, Dan Froot, Judy Mitoma, and Rennie Harris, as well as every single member of the perennially miracle-working staff of the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures. I must also thank every artist, scholar, curator, organizer, and other individual who gave freely and graciously of their time, especially Morishita Takashi, Hosoe Eikoh, Ohno Yoshito, Tanaka Min, Ishihara Shiho, Ishimoto Kae, Yamamoto Misuzu, George Kochi, Katsura Kan, William Marotti, Bruce Baird, Anna B. Scott, Nakajima Natsu, Alex Kerr, Waguri Yukio, Koyano Tetsuro, Richard Emmert, Allison Wyper, Alissa Cardone, Paul Outlaw, Chey Chankethya, Nguyen Nguyen, and many others too numerous to mention. I must also thank the funding organizations that supported my research, including the Asian Cultural Council, University of California Pacific Rim Research Program, University of California Institute for Research in the Arts, UCLA Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies, and UCLA International Institute. vii Biography Michael Sakamoto is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and scholar. His performances and visual and media works have been presented in 13 countries in Asia, Europe, and North America. He has been a guest artist and lecturer at numerous universities, colleges, and communities since 1999 and published in academic journals since 2009. Michael has received many academic and arts grants and fellowships, including from the Asian Cultural Council, Japan Foundation, Meet the Composer, James Irvine Foundation/DanceUSA, California Community Foundation, and others. He is currently on faculty in the MFA-Interdisciplinary Arts Program at Goddard College and the School of Theater at the California Institute of the Arts. Michael holds a Master of Fine Arts in Dance from the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures and a Bachelor of Arts from the UCLA Department of Communication Studies. viii INTRODUCTION (MY) BUTOH A monastic asked Zen Master Judan of Longya, "When do the teachers of old get stuck?" Longya said, "When the thief slips into an empty room." - from Eihei Dogen’s Shobogenzo collection of 300 koans “Who…are…you?” - Tamano Hiroko on the definition of butoh 1 My, Not “I” We live in an age in which mass media has overwhelmed our daily lives. Beyond the electronic broadcast saturation and packaged, audio-visual experiences proliferating since the late 20th Century, dominant ideologies constantly invade our very bodies through socio-cultural and economic dependence on personal computers, mobile communication devices, and social media. The post-industrial, service-oriented, commodified body literally consumes its virtual self. We are eating our “selves” alive. For these reasons, I believe that butoh performance is an attempt to save lives. It is a legislative bill put forward in a congress of mind, body, and spirit. It is a call to arms against our selves, the ones that we are not. But what is the generative potential of butoh, a cluster of practices that began as radical a half-century ago in Japan but are now nominally accepted by the international art world? The first generation of butoh artists in the 1960s created social imaginaries and techniques for expressing them relevant to that historical moment and place. Do core principles remain, however, that may yet generate new approaches that build upon butoh’s practical foundations and are appropriate for contemporary social urgencies in the early 21st Century? More specifically—since I can best speak for myself—based on the fundamental principles that I have employed for my own butoh practice for 20 years, how might I frame a radicalized butoh practice and with what method might I realize it? Answering such questions requires one to think not about what butoh is or has been but rather what it can be. If, as many have argued over the decades, crisis is the fundamental concept around which butoh-based practices revolve, then can a butoh-based discourse inform modes of crisis resolution in other arenas such as health, environment, economy, or politics? How can one 2 employ elements from butoh’s range of foundational concepts, forms, and techniques to devise a method for maintaining, not an avant-garde practice—in reality merely an initiatory phase—but the power of transformation over time? • • • • • Hijikata Tatsumi, the founder of butoh, promulgated a belief that the body possesses inherent knowledge of its own needs and innate mechanisms for escaping, negotiating, and reimagining the conditions of life as it knows it. In butoh’s early days, this was framed as an opposition between an industrialized, late capitalist, Western body versus a pre-modern, Japanese body. Hijikata also framed each of these identities by a social imaginary inspired by materialistically routinized behavior in oppressive urban environments for the former and tall, dark tales of his allegedly rural childhood in the Tohoku region of northern Japan for the latter. We may now view this, however, as a paradigmatic frame, a way of aesthetically conceiving and corporeally activating what Hijikata called “the body in crisis” to instigate social thought and action within the postwar avant-garde

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