Butoh ritual mexicano: An ethnography of dance, transformation, and community redevelopment.

High in the mountains of Michoacan, in the forgotten town of Tlalpujahua, one man has started a school of contemporary ritual dance that bridges east and west, ancient and contemporary forms. Students from around the world travel to this small town to study with Diego Pinon, founder of Butoh Mexicano Ritual Dance. A fusion of aesthetic principles stemming from the Japanese avant-garde and indigenous Mexican ritual structure, Butoh Ritual Mexicano has forced a collision of belief systems, and a confrontation with the values and traditions of the surrounding community. My research follows the interactions and ideologies of a dance ethnographer, a dance teacher and his students, and a redeveloping pueblo as they strive to come to a mutual understanding of each other's presence, shared space, and overlapping histories. Recruiting theoretical models of post-Marxist geography, tourism studies, and feminist ethnography, this dissertation questions the implications of transborder ritual dance within larger exploitative processes characteristic of 21st century US/Mexico relations. Border crossing, border violence, emigration, production, and tourism, manifesting in rhetorical and material strategies of faith, labor, and sacrifice, can either be exposed and challenged or romanticized and resinscribed through the ritualized framework suggested by Pinon. This dissertation aims to uncover the ways in which Butoh Ritual Mexicano reshapes and reconstitutes the site of its teaching and the bodies of its students, how these transformations confront and complicate the reality of US imperialism and global capitalism on a bodily and societal level, and what, if anything, can be gained from this dance form as an alternate mode of survival and renewal. The form and philosophies of Butoh Ritual Mexicano suggest specific approaches to movement, magic, and otherness, and this dissertation exposes the labor invested in trying to make these paradigmatic shifts; the values, risks, and harmonies at stake in changing and exchanging ideas of body, ritual, and culture in a world with increasingly stringent yet ideologically shifting borders.