Cutting the Surface of the Water
Butoh as Traumatic Awakening
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12346331 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Paula Marie Orlando (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2001 |
| Volume | 11 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 307-324 |
| Publication date | 2001-12-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Social Semiotics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1035-0330 • E-ISSN: 1470-1219 |
| Publisher | Routledge (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/10350330123376 |
| OpenAlex | W4237401367 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 5 |
In this paper, I examine Robert Jay Lifton's belief that 'imagery, symbolization, and meaning are in a life-death model or paradigm' and that traumatic experience, in particular as a death-equivalent, 'sever[s the mind] from its own psychic forms, [and] impair[s] the symbolization process itself'. Lifton believes that, for survivors of Hiroshima and for other survivors of trauma, this 'shattering of prior forms' leads to new insights and 'new dimension[s] of experience' that not only reconstitute and re-integrate the traumatized self but, more accurately, mirror the human condition. I examine this thesis within the context of a comparison and contrast between post-war Japanese poetry and the postmodern Japanese dance form called Butoh (originally Ankoku Butoh , meaning 'dark dance of the soul'). I argue that Butoh, in drawing upon traditional Japanese forms, and by displacing, extending, and exploding them, more successfully re-figures prior imagery and reintegrates the traumatized Japanese culture in ways that some post-war poetry, which relies on language and, especially, traditional Western models of language, cannot. I also consider the materiality of the body versus the materiality of language, and consider how dance, which emanates from the phenomenological body, has a materiality that escapes language and carries greater tropological power. Finally, I consider how Butoh, in troping on the Hiroshima disaster, displaces 'phallogocentric' semiotic structures and comes closer to realizing Julia Kristeva's notion of a pre-Oedipal symbolic order
Aesthetics · Art · Context (archaeology · Dance · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literature · Materiality (auditing · Materiality (auditing) · Meaning (existential · Meaning (existential) · Phenomenology (philosophy · Poetry · Postmodernism · Psychoanalysis · Self · Semiotics · Sociology · Soul · Trance · Anthropology · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · History · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Philosophy · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Psychology · Social Psychology
| Highly cited | No |
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