Paper short abstract:

This presentation will investigate affects and becomings in the avant-garde performance form of butoh by introducing cases from the presenter's fieldwork on butoh practice in Japan. It will also discuss how the researcher's body is a methodological tool in doing affective ethnography.

Paper long abstract:

The creation of avant-garde dance performance, especially butoh, is arguably a laboratory for affect. In butoh, choreographers and dancers isolate the affect of a variety of objects and phenomena and make these affects happen in their own body through movement. For the dancers, this realization of affect is not an expression, nor an imitation; they call it a becoming, naru, one of the foundations of their practice. Definitely, their embodiment of affects can be thought of as a becoming in the Deleuzian sense of the word (Deleuze and Guattari 1980). In the presenter's fieldwork, affect and becoming appeared to be inseparable in the process of creating butoh: becoming is constituted by the generation of affects, and affects are the intensities that emerge when a thing undergoes a becoming.

Following this discovery of the affects and becoming in butoh, in this presentation I will begin with the following questions: how do you become something in butoh, if you are the dancing body? If you are watching a dancing body (or thing), how do you know if it is becoming or not? To answer these questions, I will introduce short cases of becoming in butoh practice that I encountered in my fieldwork in Japan. Through these cases, I will demonstrate a physical methodology for this affective ethnography, moving among the positions of researcher, dancer, and audience member to clarify the generation of affect in and the possible conditions for these becomings. Since I am a native English speaker trained in modern dance, my background inevitably serves as my basis of comparison for my consideration of butoh practice, but it is also the source of my ingrained assumptions and thus limitations of thought. I, the researcher, can only overcome these limitations through not only reflexive thinking but also a becoming of my own. By discussing this fieldwork, I hope to demonstrate how the researcher's becoming, imagination, and relationships in the field are essential for doing affective ethnography.