Seeds of an anti-hierarchic ideal: summer training at Body Weather Farm

Abstract

From 1986 until 2010, dancer/choreographer Min Tanaka led a series of experimental body workshops in the town of Hakushu, a small village approximately four hours west of Tokyo. The methodology employed in these training sessions was grounded in the ideology of Shintai Kisho (Body Weather), which conceives of the body as a force of nature: omni-centred, anti-hierarchic, and acutely sensitive to external stimuli. Emphatically resistant to the codification and commodification of dance technique, Tanaka (whose dance was admired by Michel Foucault and Felix Guattari), sees the establishment of any repeatable, reproducible form as a collusion with the various power structures that limit human agency by controlling the body. Ideologically opposed to formalised dance pedagogy where students imitate the movements of a master teacher, the training challenged workshop members to closely imitate any physical movement, even those of the least experienced member. In these summer training sessions, struggle was valued over technical virtuosity, and physical stimulation over the type of visual imagery emphasised in many butô workshops. This paper explores the pursuit of an omni-centred, anti-hierarchic body in Tanaka's summer workshops, using material gleaned from participant observation in the 1997–2000 workshops and in-depth interviews with Tanaka himself.

Keywords::

• Japanese
• dance
• butoh
• avant-garde

Notes

^1. Body Weather Farm is no longer in existence, and Tanaka stopped leading workshops after 2010.

^2. Odette Aslan notes that when Tanaka performed in Paris in 1978 the French press categorised him as a butoh dancer (Aslan 2002, p. 177). In Japan, however, he was seen as someone outside of butoh (Harada 2004, p. 332).

^3. The initials MB are multivalent. Tanaka has described them as standing for ‘muscle and bone’, ‘mind and body’, ‘music and body’, and ‘myself as a boy’ (Fuller 2000).

^4. Literally ‘forms’, kata are series of codified movements that are a basic choreographic element of traditional Japanese performing arts such as noh, kabuki, and nihon buyo.