Reimagining the body-with-chronic pain through an ‘anthropology with butoh dance'

This chapter approaches butoh dance as an ‘art of inquiry’ (Ingold) into the living/lived body which can be re-oriented from creative movement practice towards self-care. By framing the body ‘from the inside’ as an ‘indeterminate’ somatic territory, a butoh approach grounded in somatic movement can destabilise hylomorphic and mechanistic assumptions about the body by replacing obsolete or dysfunctional optical images of the body with haptic ones that are novel and generative. Drawing on auto-praxiographic materials the author produced during the COVID-19 pandemic while self-managing her chronic pain, the chapter explores how somatic morphogenesis through butoh became a tool for self-care. It details the emergence of haptic somatic forms as the basis for butoh ‘metamorphosis’ and concludes that somatic morphogenesis has the potential of transforming the body not only for aesthetic purposes but also for wellbeing.