Beyond performance in Japanese Butoh dance: Embodying re-creation of self and social identities.

The purpose of this study is to understand how the members of the Butoh Seiryukai dance group, founded in 1994, perceive Butoh in their meaning systems. The original Butoh dance was created in 1959 in Japan as a critical reaction to Western culture and political domination. But Seiryukai's improvisational approach and non-performative orientation to Butoh do not mirror the early Butoh's activities grounded in social resistance. The qualitative inquiry of this study using ethnographic methods made it possible to understand the Seiryukai members' socio-cultural world as embodied experience from a somatic first person perspective, which augmented the researcher's third person knowledge deriving from interviews, participant observations, and archival documents. Participation in Seiryukai may best be explained as creating a self through the dynamic interaction of individuals in a cohesive social frame, which can be captured by the Japanese concept of Ba. This is a relationally constructed self which is to be contrasted with the Western concept of self embodied in political, historical, and social relations and yet is different from the Japanese cultural concept of collective self. Social reflexive theories reinforce the concept of such a relational self in which the agent as an active participant in organizing social activity extends the body's vocabulary to a non-bounded self through consciousness and movement. The findings of the research show that Seiryukai functions as a transformational Ba in which improvisational interaction generates relational knowledge and creates reflective selves through somatic movement and dialogic interaction. The result is that the individual identities thus achieved for Seiryukai participants act as a means of creating reflective knowledge which contributes to the re-creation of an integral self that can function in more personally fulfilling ways. These insights provide a foundation for an integrated model of knowledge creation that honors somatic, physical, emotional, relational, social, and generative ways of knowing.