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Am J Dance Ther (2012) 34:174178 DOI 10.1007/s10465-012-9145-7
BOOK REVIEW
Sondra Fraleigh: Butoh: Metamorphic Dance and Global Alchemy
University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 2010, 264 pp, Cloth $85.00, Paper $30.00
Corinna Brown
Published online: 6 December 2012 American Dance Therapy Association 2012
A reading of most of Sondra Fraleighs work stimulates ones ontological and phenomenological concerns. Her recent book, Butoh: Metamorphic Dance and Global Alchemy, is no exception. In it she brings the reader her lived experience of studying, watching, and teaching butoh. Using a mix of expository writing, rst person accounts, and her own poetry she generously shares her 25-year study with various butoh masters (most inuentially Kazuo and Yoshito Ohno). In doing so, Fraleigh personalizes, analyzes, and explicates what to some can be an esoteric art form, making it more accessible to the non-initiated while also deepening insight for butoh-ka (butoh dancers). The result is an engaging, informative, and thought provoking text useful to anyone who is engaged with dance, somatics, transformation, or healing.
The book is comprised of three sections. Those with no prior knowledge of butoh will benet from the historical overview Fraleigh presents in the rst part. Here she clearly articulates butohs Japanese roots and expertly contextualizes its unique place in dance history, contrasting it with ballet, modern dance, German expressionism a la Mary Wigman, Pina Bausch, and Neue Tanz, modernism, and post modernism. The rst part of the text provides thought provoking questions regarding culture, philosophy, performance, aesthetics, and healing. Part two takes the reader to 20 different butoh performances all over the world, further weaving together the themes introduced in the rst three chapters. Part three brings the text full circle, returning to butohs origin, its still morphing root, revisiting Tatsumi Hijikatas Forbidden Colors (1959), the very rst butoh performance, and nishing with a tender description of Yoshito Ohnos tribute to his father, Kuu (emptiness), performed at the New York Butoh Festival in 2007.
What practitioners of dance/movement therapy (DMT) will nd most valuable in this book are Fraleighs ideas about butoh and healing (Chapters 1-3). She examines
C. Brown (&)105 Lexington Avenue, Apt 1B, Brooklyn, NY 11238, USA e-mail: [email protected]
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the healing aspects of butoh, not through the...