Content area
Full Text
BUTOH: METAMORPHIC DANCE AND GLOBAL ALCHEMY. By Sondra Fraleigh. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. 251 pp. Cloth, $85; paper, $30.
Since the early 1980s, when groups like Sankai Juku and Dairakuda-kan first toured in the United States and Europe, audiences have been fascinated by the shaved heads, white makeup, slow movement, and striking visual imagery that have come to define butoh for audiences worldwide. At the same time, numerous performing artists have been inspired to study butoh themselves, creating an increasingly large number of non-Japanese butoh and "butoh-inspired" dancers. Fraleigh's third book on the topic of butoh is the first book-length study in English to attempt an analysis of the movement as a whole since Susan Blakely Klein's Ankoku Butoh: The Premodern and Postmodern Influences on the Dance of Utter Darkness (Klein 1988) and the first ever to give significant space to its adoption by non-Japanese performers. Fraleigh presents butoh as a global, shamanistic healing practice: an "alchemical form" (p. 16) characterized by transformation (or "morphing") that employs surrealist strategies to liberate the unconscious, fosters the creation of "personal ethnologies" (p. 31), and builds community. The book is divided into two main sections. The first presents her overall view of butoh, heavily colored by her personal universalist metaphysics. The second, longer section consists of performance reviews, many of which are accompanied by Fraleigh's own poetry, composed in response to the dances. A brief third section looks at the ursprung of butoh, which the author finds in the shamanist basis of Hijikata Tatsumi's and Ohno Kazuo's collaboration, and their differing responses to the devastation of World War II.
Fraleigh is at her best when describing individual performances. Her reviews present a diverse sampling of dance works, many by artists of whom little has been written. Her descriptions of pieces by the Swedish dancer SU-EN, Takenouchi Atsushi, UK-based Marie-Gabrielle Roti, Yoshioka Yumiko, Eiko and Koma, Endo Tadashi, the Mexican "butoh ritual" dancer Diego Piñón, and others are at times insightful, if tinged by her own subjective concerns. Her descriptions...