Butoh / VR

How does the assistance of virtual reality impact students’ ability to embody movement concepts? This project, Tuning to our Environment, is a collaboration I am undertaking with The Advanced Computing Center for Art and Design (ACCAD) to develop a creative visualization and virtual reality tool using butoh dance movements and imagery. I invited butoh artist Minako Seki, with whom I have studied for several years, to explore motion capture as a means of building virtual reality environments with her movements and performance techniques. She joined us for 10 days in 2023 and will be returning for another 10 days in Summer 2024.

Workshop Images drawn by Haruko Nishimura during Minako Seki workshop, Berlin 2003.

Project Description
How do we hear movement and see sound? Japanese butoh dance uses many onomatopoeic instructions to combine sound and image into performance cues. Teachers often share pictures with students to spark the imagination for movement explorations. Many teachers lead extended workshops out in remote natural settings, to immerse their students in environments that are different from everyday human existence as a means of activating our sensate bodies and generating unique creative expression.

As a result of the structure of training, this experience can be exclusive and prohibitive for many who cannot afford the time or expense to travel. I want to bring the creative potential of in-depth butoh training into the academy and in my research, I look for inventive ways to do so. My collaborators in ACCAD have expertise in developing visualizations and virtual reality, and have conducted numerous pedagogical experiments with these technologies, including training students in mime performer Marcel Marceau’s movement sequences. We are undertaking a similar experiment with Minako Seki’s butoh methods, and then taking it further to allow the student to impact their virtual environment. The goal is to create somatic feedback that can impact the student’s visceral experience.

Relevance and Impact
Immersive imagery training is incredibly valuable for performers to create inventive internal experiences that can enhance their performative presence. A performer’s internal state can communicate something monumental, drawing the audience in to their internal experience.

In butoh, the performer aims to transform into qualities, atmospheres, objects, and creatures from a distinctly non-human perspective. The performer enters a new logic that is no longer concerned with intellect, psychology, or anything that one would deem to be ‘normal’ human behavior. The point of this is not merely strangeness; it is to blur the expression of “normal” human-ness, to question conditioned responses, and ultimately, to propose new ways of inhabiting the body.

One of the issues I encounter in image training with performers is that they will first copy outward shapes and telegraph anthropomorphic ideas about an image (i.e.“I am a cat, I will bat at you coyly with my hand/paw”), meaning they are more concerned with being legible as an image rather than allowing themselves to experience an image from their own internal sensation. It is my hope that working in VR surrounded in an unfamiliar landscape will shift the performers’ experience and allow them to develop a new awareness and sensation and the polyrhythmic time that is important to butoh work.

Post-modern dance around the world—and I include butoh in this as a post-modern artform—made use of ostranie(defamiliarisation), the use of radical recontextualisation in order to ‘recover the sensation of life’ amid the wartime devastation (Banes 2003, p. 5).  The idea was to shock the senses awake from the numbing effects of modern life. While one could certainly blame increased reliance on technology for such desensitization, this project seeks to lean in to our contemporary adoption of technological advancements and further push the boundaries of our experience.  Butoh artist Yuko Wager was fond of saying: ‘most dance asks “what can my arm do,” butoh asks, “what is my arm?”’ (personal communication, 10 Jan 2011). Through our butoh VR experiment, I hope for students to consider their bodies anew.