Nissan Seminar: Alice Baldock (Oxford), ‘Bodies Without Hierarchy? The Intellectual Lives of Women Butoh Dancers in Postwar Japan and the World’
Convener(s): Professor Sho Konishi
Speaker(s): Alice Baldock (Oxford)
In early postwar Japan, the body was falling apart – or at least, it appeared to be. In a period where the meaning of the body, and who had control of it, seemed to be up for debate, a group of women dancers were contending with a plethora of state-manufactured inequalities between different bodies. This talk discusses the ways that these dancers created an alternative way of living in postwar Japan which sought to bypass or overcome these inequalities. This manifested in an artform was called butoh, 舞踏, a type of dance where dancers transformed themselves into other beings as a way of undermining the supposed fixity of the body in postwar Japan. After exploring the early postwar development of this form, the talk will explore how and why butoh became such a transnational artform, with practitioners the world over by the start of the twenty-first century. Through the lenses of gender, intellectual, and transnational history, we will see butoh as a genuine response to how to think about 'the body' in the postwar world.
Alice Baldock is the Okinaga Junior Research Fellow in Japanese Studies at Wadham College and the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies at the University of Oxford, and a Visiting Research Fellow at Teikyo University. Her research interests include twentieth century Japanese history, gender in postwar Japan and the transnational circulation of ideas around ‘the body’. Her current book project focuses on the intellectual views of a group of butoh dancers in the mid-twentieth century regarding the body (especially nikutai, or flesh body) and movement. Her work has been published in the Journal of Asian Studies and is forthcoming in Women and History. She is also the co-author of a forthcoming edited volume of the histories of ordinary women, feminism, and environmentalism in Japan, and has contributed to several other edited volumes on histories of sex work, ecofeminism, and the history of the Tōhoku region in Japan. She also has a creative practice and has performed in both solo and group pieces around the world, including at Chisenhale Dance Space in the UK as both a soloist and with Posthuman Theatre, in Tokyo and Kanazawa in Japan with company Mutekisha, as a soloist at the Queer Butoh Festival in New York City, and for Sombre Compagnie in Brussels. Her work and details of upcoming publications and performances are available at https://irisdancer.com/.
