Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-21T11:59:20.055Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Stranger Communities: Art Labour and Berliner Butoh

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2014

Abstract

I examine the art labour of three Japanese women butoh artists living and working internationally. They are foreign at home and abroad: when these artists return to Japan, they are erased from the current arts scene or they are cast as outsiders in a separate category from ‘Japanese artists’; they are also compelled to keep their butoh designation in foreign places because it lends an exotic, economically viable Japanese-ness to their art labour. The artists complicate any simple outsider/resident status or national/cultural representation. They also take on an in-transit-ness, in which they are always on the move and always ‘at work’. I argue that their art-labour-under-duress amplifies their physical intensity, arising from interrelated pressures such as economic conditions and relationships with butoh and Japanese art labour practices. This art labour intensity sustains creativity and initiates a ‘stranger community’ that is a vital part of their radical art labour and survival.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

1 Grosz, Elizabeth, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 All Japanese names are in the Japanese order of surname first and given name second.

3 Machida, Margo, Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Artists and the Social Imaginary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 24Google Scholar.

4 Franko, Mark, The Work of Dance: Labor, Movement, and Identity in the 1930s (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), p. 2Google Scholar.

5 Ibid., p. 2.

6 Bhabha, Homi K.The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 37Google Scholar.

7 Ibid., pp. 37, 39.

8 Ibid., p. 39.

9 Manning, Erin, Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (Boston: The MIT Press, 2009), p. 27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Hamera, Judith, Dancing Communities: Performance, Difference, and Connection in the Global City (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillian, 2007), p. 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Ibid, p. 5.

12 Ibid, p. 59.

13 Ibid., p. 18.

14 Ibid., p. 3.

15 Ibid., p. 3.

16 Gilbert, Helen and Tomkins, Joanne, Post-colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 242CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Ibid., p. 206.

18 Lepecki, André, ‘Five Thoughts on the Choreo-political Neo-colonial’, in Hager, Martin, ed., The Third Body (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2004), pp. 143–7, here p. 145Google Scholar.

19 Ibid., p. 143–5.

20 Ibid., p. 145.

21 Baird, Bruce, Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh, Dancing in a Pool of Gray Grits (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Kondo, Dorinne, Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 107Google Scholar.

23 Bojana Kunst, unpublished presentation, Dance (and) Theory symposium. Berlin: Ufer Studios, 2011.