ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with an orientation to butoh and Body Weather, and presents ideas from dance, ecology, and posthumanist philosophy together to articulate how these dance practices can facilitate what Ann Cooper Albright calls an “ecological consciousness.” Butoh is an avant-garde dance developed in Japan in the late 1950s and 1960s by a group of dancers centered on Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno. Nature images like wind and clay, and an orientation to site, are considered important sources of stimulation for training and performance. Radical changes to conceptions of space and time in postmodernity have been accompanied by a concomitant shift in the relationship of choreography to space. The process of erasing the body’s outlines is meant to make room for something else to enter, while expanding in all directions enables an active encounter with the world, akin to the ecological consciousness Albright describes.
