Abstract

Written from an Australian practitioner’s perspective, this article critically discusses the
notion of the ‘empty body’ in Japanese Butoh and Body Weather training. Accounts of
workshop activities led by Min Tanaka and Frank van de Ven illustrate the usage of
‘emptiness’ as a first stage in the process of ‘dancing a place.’ The article draws upon
feminist theory to identify problematic connotations inherent in the notion of an empty
body, while postcolonial discourse casts doubt on the appropriateness of the use of
‘emptiness’ as a starting point for movement in relation to place in the transposition of
Butoh and Body Weather practices to the Australian context.

Key words: Butoh, Body Weather, site-specific performance, Postcolonialism

Empty?
A critique of the notion of ‘emptiness’ in Butoh and Body Weather training
Gretel Taylor

Min Tanaka once famously stated: ‘I do not dance in the place; but I am the place’
(Viala and Masson-Sekine, 1988, p.158). At other times he has been known to speak of
‘dancing the place, not dancing in the place.’ High in the spectacular beauty of the
French Pyrenees, with vultures circling overhead, Dutch Body Weather proponent Frank
van de Ven invited our workshop group to attempt to ‘dance the place, instead of merely
dancing in it’.

This semiotic distinction (‘dancing the place’ as opposed to ‘dancing in the place’),
though ambiguously open to interpretation, bears a trace of the assumed neutrality or
‘emptiness’ that Butoh and Body Weather practitioners hold as a psycho-physical
possibility: if I am dancing ‘in the place’, I am my self there, but if I am ‘dancing the
place’, my self is subsumed into the place. Van de Ven’s addition of ‘merely dancing in
the place’ presumes other modes of relating to place that may involve a subjective
individual inhabitation to be inferior to his (and Tanaka’s) apparently ‘objective’, pre-ego
mode. I would come to question this presumption.

As an Australian researcher exploring relationships between the body and place via site-
based performance-making processes, I had traveled to participate in Frank van de
Ven’s Body/Landscape Workshop in Itxassou, France and Bohemiae Rosa, another
workshop facilitated by van de Ven and visual artist Miloš Šejn in the Czech Republic
(2005). Having been a member of Min Tanaka’s company Maijuku, Frank van de Ven’s

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methods are based firmly in ‘Body Weather’, the physical training/ research/ philosophy
developed by Tanaka. My experiences of immersion in Body Weather practices in
Europe brought me to reflect also upon Min Tanaka’s intensive month-long dance
workshops that I had attended at his Body Weather Farm in Hakushu, Japan, in 1999
and 2000, and to critically analyse some aspects of this work, in particular the notion of
an ‘empty body’ that Body Weather has implicitly inherited from Butoh.

Tanaka’s philosophy and physical training engage in rigorous investigation of the body in
relation to its environment. His solo works and the group works Tanaka directs for his
current company, Tokasan, are often situated in natural environments or non-
conventional performance spaces. Min Tanaka was strongly influenced by his teacher
and sometimes collaborator, Tatsumi Hijikata, founder of Butoh dance or Ankoko Buto—
the ‘dance of utter darkness’ that emerged out of post-war Japan in the 1960s.1 Whilst
Tanaka is adamant that he ‘does not teach Butoh dance’, there are some overlaps
between Butoh and Body Weather in physical approaches and underlying philosophies,
evidencing Hijikata’s lingering influence on Tanaka. Although Butoh has traveled over
the fifty years of its existence, rather like a spirit, to become an international
phenomenon that takes endless forms, it was developed as a specifically Japanese
aesthetic, arising out of a particular Japanese (anti-western, post-atomic bombing)
experience. Unlike Butoh, Body Weather has never been culturally specific—almost from
its inception Tanaka surrounded himself with international dancers—and purports to be
an open-ended training for investigation and expansion of any body’s capacity for
movement. Min Tanaka also insists that Body Weather is not a ‘technique’ or even a
style of dance and certainly not an aesthetic or a ‘system’ (a word he utters with great
contempt) of training or movement. He is dedicated to the continual evolvement of
research of the body and reacts with disdain to those he considers to have taken his
processes and attempted to solidify them into any fixed syllabus-like order.

Echoing Body Weather’s resistance to fixity, Peter Snow in his PhD thesis on Body
Weather (2002) and in a paper presented to the Pyrenees workshop group in 2005,
notes that weather and bodies are characterised by change. Snow proposes that
weather could entail our ‘milieu, the prevailing surroundings, the changing and evolving

1
The history and phenomenon of Butoh has been extensively researched and documented
elsewhere, so I will not elaborate this history in this essay.

2
situations in which we find ourselves’ (2005). This expansive conceptualisation of
weather extends to ‘the possibility of social contexts being a kind of weather’ (Snow,
2005). At Itxassou Snow talked about weather as a system of unpredictable yet cyclic
forces that course through the world and through bodies. Weather, he proposes,
includes the ‘processes of bodies themselves, the multiple environments that bodies and
parts of bodies are made up of, from the “cellular to the organic”, from the anatomical to
the biochemical to the physiological’ (2002). Relating these notions of weather to the
active training of Body Weather, Peter Snow quotes a characteristically ambiguous
statement by Min Tanaka: ‘Body Weather diagram does not have solid lines but dotted
lines with continuous lines in and out’ (Snow, 2002, p110 cited Tanaka, 1981, p14).
Tanaka may be suggesting a fluidity between interiority and exteriority—that the borders
of the body are not fixed, but permeable or mutable. He could also be referring to the
changeability of Body Weather training itself—that its tasks and exercises, like the
weather, are not rigid but ever adapting, evolving.

Perhaps the most well known of Body Weather practices is ‘MB’. This acronym, again in
typical ambiguity, means either/ and Mind-Body, Muscle-Bone or Music-Body. This
dancers’ version of aerobics comprises a series of exercises sourced from international
folk dance and sport, traveling across space to rhythmic music. This training increases
cardiovascular fitness, strength, flexibility, co-ordination and tests and extends the
body’s capacity to multi-task. Another aspect of Min Tanaka’s work focuses upon the
sensory body, including perception tasks such as blindfolded explorations; following
stimulations directed by a partner’s touch to move one’s body parts in specific directions
with varied degrees of energy or emulating the wind’s influence upon the body. Min
Tanaka once left the workshop group I was a part of blindfolded for an hour atop a very
steep icy mountain, saying “Experience the sensations!” Tanaka’s ‘dance’ training/
philosophy also encompasses farm work. He sees tending to the land for food as a
fundamental part of the cycle of body and place. Tanaka considers that there are clues
in the practical and efficient physicality of farm work to be integrated into our dancing
bodies. Another facet of Body Weather is the practice of ‘images’, which I will discuss
later in this critique.

Since working in Japan as a member of Tanaka’s company Maijuku (from 1983 to 1991),
Frank van de Ven has led ‘Body Weather Amsterdam’ with partner Katerina Bakatsaki

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(also ex-Maijuku), innovatively developing his interpretations of Tanaka’s teachings in
relation to European places. At van de Ven’s Body/Landscape workshop in 2005, we
undertook various perceptual tasks that assisted to open our senses to the places we
inhabited—the outdoor environments local to our accommodation in the Basque
countryside. One of these tasks was to move at “one millimetre per second”. This activity
attunes one’s focus to carefully control the body’s movement at this very slow pace over
the course of ten or fifteen minutes (at a time). I became aware of subtleties of sound,
airflow against my skin and (almost) sensed the trees and plants ‘growing’ in close
proximity to my body by moving with this intensely slow focus. We also observed the
movement of specific features of our surroundings and tried to ‘acquire’ qualities of these
movements in various parts our bodies. We then found ourselves atop the mountain, as
earlier mentioned, being instructed to ‘dance the place, instead of merely dancing in it.’

Following a discussion about the possible meanings of dancing the- instead of dancing
in the-, Frank van de Ven gave our group of workshop participants the following series of
directions: Choose a place and lie down. From lying down, spend two or three minutes
‘emptying’, then two or three minutes ‘perceiving’, then ‘dance the place!’2 He offered a
hint to ‘start small’, just letting one part of the body be affected by one aspect of the
place. If it is not ‘working’, move to another place. Repeat this process three times in
different locations around the area. Van de Ven then added a ‘joke’ that if we were good,
well-trained Body Weather dancers, we could ‘empty ourselves’, perceive all aspects of
the place and ‘dance the place’, and each of us would therefore do exactly the same
dance in each place! Our facilitator revealed his own skepticism and interrogation of his
process by this joking statement. Although he is an advocate of the enabling possibilities
of ‘emptiness’, he is evidently aware of its avoidance of the specificities of individual
selves-bodies.

In discussion with other workshop participants afterwards, I gathered that I was not the
only one plagued with inertia in my attempts to undertake the task after this introduction.
We were daunted by the task of moving with authenticity and dubious of the arrogance
or anthropocentricism of even trying to perceive and dance this place, when we had only

2
This task/ practice was borrowed from or inspired by Min Tanaka’s 1824-hour Hyperdance
Projection project, which comprised improvisations in more than one hundred and fifty locations in
Japan over a three month period.

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spent a few minutes there. Disbelief or doubt in our ability to drop our personalities,
backgrounds, gender, age, beliefs, knowledge, etc, within two or three minutes, in order
to become transparent, open vessels for perceiving and expressing this place with some
sort of ‘neutral’ ‘objectivity’, was so disabling as to render most of us immobile.

According to renowned Butoh critic Nario Goda, Tatsumi Hijikata’s company Hangi
Daito-Kan was based on the idea that ‘Buto begins with the abandonment of self’ (Klein,
1988, p.34). A major objective of Butoh in its formative years (the 1960s and 1970s) was
to break through the Western ideal of individualism ‘to a collective (or communal)
unconscious in order to find a more authentic autonomy of self’ (Klein, p.34). Susan
Blakely Klein in her article ‘Ankoko Buto’ attributes this rebellion against individualism to
the influence of Japanese ethnographer Kunio Yanagita’s thoughts on the
transcendence of the modern (p.32). Dispensing of the individual subject has been
performed in various ways by Butoh dancers, as represented by the literally stripped-
back aesthetic of shaved heads, nakedness and white-painted bodies of ‘classic’ Butoh.
Another strategy Butoh employs to transcend the individual/ self is via a process of
‘continual metamorphosis to confront the audience with the disappearance of the
individual subject by refusing to let any dancer remain a single identifiable character’
(Klein, p.32). The metamorphosis Klein refers to is often described as the use of
imagery: the transformational becoming or embodiment of forms from the imagination.
Hijikata in his later career invented approximately one thousand of these ‘images’, which
he taught to his lead female dancer Yoko Ashikawa and many of which he also taught to
Min Tanaka, who in turn passed some of the images on to his students. Some examples
of Hijikata’s images (as I have learned them from Tanaka) are: ants walk in between
your teeth; a moth flutters on your forehead; your internal organs are falling out, horses
gallop on your back, which is a paddock; your legs and pelvis are a cow’s, pissing; your
arms are beckoning to a soul… In relation to place or site-based work, images are
invented from specific features of one’s environment. In an Australianised ‘borrowing’ of
Hijikata’s/ Tanaka’s method, I sometimes use the Butoh mode of imagery to apply
localised textures and qualities of a site to various parts of my body. Images I used in the
South Australian desert, for example, included: cracked clay face, spinifex legs, blow-fly
elbow… Butoh’s aspired state of self-abandonment or emptiness is considered the ideal
corporeal condition upon which to inscribe such images.

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Yukio Mishima’s controversial writing, which engaged with taboos in post-war Japan,
was also influential on Butoh’s development.3 Hijikata and other underground artists felt
a desire to break through the mask of conservative respectability to reveal the
‘submerged depths of violence and sexuality’ within Japanese society (Klein, p.25).
German expressionist dance of the 1930s, with its ideal of the dancer as a ‘pure’ or
‘purified’ ‘instrument’, was a western influence upon Butoh.4 Klein elucidates that the
liberation of dancers’ ‘belief in themselves as a unified subject’ was also striven for via
methods such as ritualised violence, to ‘explore the possibility of our inner fragmentation’
(p.33). Kazuo Ohno, Butoh’s other founder, working towards a similar essentialist ideal,
but far less aggressively, encouraged a ‘gentle amelioration of the cultural body’; a
‘clearing of the body’s habits, to stimulate new freedoms’ (Klein, p.33).

Hijikata spoke of ‘a dead body standing with his life at risk’ (Sayaka, 1998), ‘the body
that has been robbed’ and favoured the violent overthrow or ‘gestalt transplant’ of ‘the
missing body’ (Fraleigh, 2003, pp.63-4), whereas Tanaka breaks down the concept of a
unified body and rational self via the rigorous (often militaristic) training of Body Weather,
still aiming for a state prior to individual conditioning. ‘Let go of Society!’ Min would yell at
us (workshop participants), at his open-air studio in the forest, as we tried to strip our
selves bare of everything we had ever learned, in order to be open to becoming a
chicken, or whatever else he demanded (1999).5 In a calmer moment, reflecting upon his
own performances nude in natural environments, Min Tanaka commented ‘It is nature’s
body and our own nature that Butoh seeks to restore’ (Fraleigh, p.64). This comment
infers a belief in (and valuing of) the potential to erase or undo the (social) experiences
of the body in a return to an idealized ‘purity’ or untainted state. It should be noted that
other forms of dance training also reduce the dancer’s individuality, including classical
ballet, which disciplines its ‘corps de ballet’ to clone-like homogeneity. While Butoh
attempts to transcend the individual to purportedly arrive at a raw, liberated state
however, ballet strives towards conformity and cultivated control.

3
Kinjiki (Forbidden Colours), Hijikata’s first ‘Butoh’ work in 1959 was based on a novel by
Mishima. (Vicki Sanders, ‘Dancing and the Dark Soul of Japan: An Aesthetic Analysis of Butoh’,
Asian Theatre Journal, 5, 2, 1988, p149)
4
Takeya Eguchi had been a student of Mary Wigman, and was instrumental in introducing Neue
Tanz to Japan, Kazuo Ohno among his pupils. (Mark Holborn, ‘Tatsumi Hijikata and the Origins of
Butoh’, in Butoh: Dance of the Dark Soul, Sadev/ Aperture, New York, 1987, p10)
5
This formidable military-like style was typical of Min’s teaching in 1999, but in the 2000 workshop
he was quieter, and by 2002 when I attended his workshop in Melbourne, he was almost
compassionate!

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The ideal of emptiness in Butoh and Body Weather includes an implied aspiration to a
non-gender-specific body—a kind of blueprint or universal body that exists beneath or
before sexual, ethnic, racial, class difference, etc.6 Classical ballet and many traditional
folk/ cultural dance forms have prescribed roles for men and women, which support and
perpetuate patriarchal gender positions. By contrast, dance theorist Sally Gardner
(1996) points out, there are several (western) postmodern dance and bodywork
practices that aspire to a ‘neutrality’. One would be hard-pressed to find more divergent
forms sprung from more different cultural contexts, however, these western practices,
similarly to Butoh in its goal of emptiness, employ processes of de-construction as
strategies to facilitate ‘a body available for re-inscription in “other” ways.’ (Gardner, 1996,
p.51). As Gardner suggests, part of this on-going process of de-inscribing in order to re-
inscribe, involves gender. While in postmodern dance practices this is implemented via a
discourse of ‘neutral’ anatomical and spatial information, Min Tanaka’s training demands
the de-programming of socialised behaviour, which includes gendered behaviour or
mannerisms—unconsciously or consciously acquired.

In the years since I trained at the Body Weather Farm, my exposure to (western)
poststructuralist theory has led me to question this underlying and pervasive aim of the
work. Feminists argue that the assumption of ‘neutrality’ or universality in bodywork
practices is implicitly (if unconsciously) attempting to revert to a blueprint of a male body.
Gardner for example, asks ‘Is there really an imagined masculine body behind the
supposedly ‘de-constructed’ one?’ (p.50) I similarly inquire: is the ‘emptied’ body of Body
Weather and Butoh actually aspiring to a prototype of a male body? In direct contrast to
this view, Sondra Horton Fraleigh argues that ‘Butoh, like the original modern dance,
takes its essence from our feminine (yin) body, the dark symbol of myth, our earth body
or the Great Goddess archetype.’ (2003, p.52) The emptiness of Butoh, Fraleigh implies,
derives from the transparent, nonjudgmental, yielding qualities attributed to the universal
feminine. This may have been so for Kazuo Ohno’s Butoh, in which he has often danced
female or effeminate characters (for example ‘My Mother’ and ‘La Argentina’), but I do
not believe this ‘feminine body’ carries over as the ‘essence’ of Min Tanaka’s Body

6
Gender is often constructed in deliberate and stylised ways in Butoh performance—gender and
sexuality are popular subject matter and often subverted from conventional/ socially acceptable
models, but I would argue that this is an overlay or re-inscription after the self has been
deconstructed, ameliorated by the training.

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Weather. In any case the ‘feminine body’ Fraleigh introduces is not the same as the
‘female body’ and could, in the case of Ohno, even suggest that Butoh’s empty body
aspires, perhaps unconsciously, to a prototype of a ‘feminine’ male body. Furthermore,
the body cannot be devoid of sex, any more than it can be devoid of skin colour, and
aspiring to neutrality or emptiness is fictitious, at best, and problematic.

Elizabeth Grosz in her seminal work Volatile Bodies (1994) identifies three conceptions
of the body in contemporary thought that she suggests ‘may be regarded as the heirs of
Cartesianism’—a legacy that Grosz proposes feminist theory ‘needs to move beyond in
order to challenge its own investments in the history of philosophy’ (p.8). In the first line
of investigation, according to Grosz, the body is ‘regarded as an object for the natural
sciences’, secondly it is construed ‘as an instrument, a tool, or a machine at the disposal
of consciousness’ and thirdly the body is considered ‘a signifying medium, a vehicle of
expression’ (pp.8-9). The second line of investigation, that construes the body as an
instrument/ tool requiring discipline and training, is relevant to Body Weather, which
certainly disciplines and trains the body as if it were an instrument in need of tuning (as
distinct from some contemporary [western] approaches to movement that work with the
everyday, pedestrian body.) It is the third line of investigation however, that
encompasses common thinking about the dancer’s body and which is most pertinent to
this discussion. Grosz explicates the body-as-expressive-vehicle assumption (pp.9-10):

It is through the body that ... [the subject] can receive, code and translate the inputs of
the “external” world. Underlying this view … is a belief in the fundamental passivity and
transparency of the body. Insofar as it can be seen as a medium, carrier or bearer of
information that comes from elsewhere …, the specificity and concreteness of the body
must be neutralized, tamed … If the subject is to gain knowledge about the external
world, have any chance of making itself understood by others, … the body must be seen
as an unresistant pliability which minimally distorts information, or at least distorts it in a
systematic and comprehensible fashion, so that its effects can be taken into account and
information can be correctly retrieved. Its corporeality must be reduced to a predictable,
knowable transparency; its constitutive role in forming thoughts, feelings, emotions and
psychic representations must be ignored, as must its role as a threshold between the
social and the natural.

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These assumptions, Grosz argues, participate in the ‘social devaluing of the body that
goes hand in hand with the oppression of women’ (p.10). The above passage could
almost have been written to describe a primary aspect of the philosophy of the body
inherent in Body Weather and Butoh. Indeed, Min Tanaka used to call his farm in
Hakushu the Body Weather Laboratory, a title that suggests a scientific experiment
whereby the body’s receptors are believed to elicit retrievable and consistent
information. This view of the body as ‘unresistant pliability’ that is able to extract
comprehensible and systematic data from the external world is epitomized by van de
Ven’s ‘joke’, whereby if we were well-trained Body Weather practitioners, we would all
do the same dance in any given place. Although van de Ven was in this instance
laughing at his proposition, there is an intrinsic belief in the practice of Body Weather
exercises that the individual particularity and past experience of the body must be
neutralised and tamed in order to accurately perceive and express aspects of a place.

Feminist theory insists that the body is always, already, irrevocably marked by sex,
gender, ethnicity, race, age, class, etc., as well as inscribed constantly by the changing
conditions of our individual worlds. I know that to temporarily, fictitiously suspend these
identifying markers via a Butoh/ Body Weather process of ‘emptying’, can enable my
attention to be totally focused upon an image (designated by the director/
choreographer—often by myself), which can be a transformative experience and
effective performance tool. However, I also consider those very aspects I am attempting
to transcend to be valuable tools for performance. If I am affected by ‘Society’, as Min
Tanaka infers by his command that we ‘let go’ of it, then I do not want to deny the fact. I
believe it important to acknowledge these effects, in accord with my resistant politics,
influenced by feminist theorists such as Elizabeth Grosz and Adrienne Rich, who
proclaimed the need ‘not to transcend this body, but to reclaim it…’ (2003, p30). If my
body is inscribed before I am even born, by such determining markings as skin colour,
sex, ethnicity, class, religion, etc., I do not wish to attempt to ignore these influences
upon my self-body as a performer and, in my particular area of research, these
influences upon my relationship to place. This is not to presume that my self is entirely
knowable or controllable, but to propose that choices can be made in performance to
(re)present certain aspects of identity and that (attempted) abandonment of the self in
relation to place is not necessary for a dance with place.

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Back on the French mountain slope, we workshop members were frustrated at our
(failed) attempt to ‘empty, perceive and dance the place’, but the frustration sparked
what became a lively and ongoing debate about the place of identity in this sort of work.
Perhaps the most valuable aspect of this workshop was the opportunity to engage in
dialogue (verbal and otherwise) with international practitioners, many of whom had
evolved both theoretical and physical knowledge of the relationship between body and
place. I presented a paper at the workshop, which further fuelled the fire begun on the
mountain. I offered a proposition of acquainting with or relating to a place as opposed to
dominating it or submitting to/ being consumed by it. This arose out of my practice of
‘locating’—a movement improvisation in relation to place or site. My locating process
begins from a multi-sensorial listening partially inspired by Body Weather sensory
tasks—I focus on my perception of localised sounds, rhythms, textures, movement and
smells, as well as visual cues such as the contour and colour of features in my
surroundings. These perceptual observations initiate my movement and gradually a two-
way exchange develops between my body’s gestures and the moment-to-moment
‘events’ of the chosen site. This locating dance is the relationship between my body and
the place: it is simultaneously the seeking of relationship and the expression, enactment
or illustration of it.

Moving in relation to a place, I explained, the dance is a reciprocal communication

between my self-body and the place. Luce Irigaray in The Way of Love (2002) proposes
that we have not yet developed a culture of relation to the other (referring to inter-
personal relationships) and suggests ‘ways to approach the other, to prepare a space of
proximity’, via gestures, ‘including gestures in language’ towards the cultivation of
nearness (p. ix, Preface). I have chosen to shift my emphasis away from the ‘empty
body’—and therefore away from the notion of ‘dancing the place’—and towards the idea
that my self-body is dancing in relation to place. My proposal of relation to place aligns
more closely with Irigaray’s ‘interweaving of exchanges’ and dialogue of ‘listening-to’
(p.x) than with Butoh/ Body Weather’s empty-then-absorb approach.

By performing my locating dances in Australian sites over several years, I have come to
realise that the relationship between my body and a place is inseparable from another
factor: identity. As a white Australian woman, my relationship to Australian places is
complicated by my knowledge of colonial history, whereby ‘my people’ came to inhabit

10
this land via processes of invasion, dispossession and genocide of the Indigenous
peoples. I feel my attempts to acquaint with this country to be ruptured by this history.
The acknowledgement of unending unfoldment inherent in my notion of ‘locating’ echoes
the long-term or ongoing process of reconciliation between Indigenous and non-
Indigenous Australians that we, in 2009, have still barely begun. Thus, the site-based
performance works I make as outcomes of my locating practice often articulate this
struggle or rupture. My performance works explore the implications and potential of
‘locating’ in relation to the local site as well as treating the specific site as a microcosm
for the broader context of contemporary Australia.

It is thus my choice in my site-based works in Australia to acknowledge and bring

attention to the particular identity marker of my own white skin. By this decision I intend
to remind audiences of the continuing impingement of colonial history upon the present
and suggest that this history affects our embodied relation to this country. Reina Lewis
and Sara Mills, in Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (2003) state that: ‘the link
between past exploitation and present affluence, and indeed the deeds of past
colonialists and oneself, is one which white people have found difficult to deal with in
constructive ways’ (p.7). Until very recently, the overwhelming response by white
Australia to these pervasive historical links has been denial. Whilst to white people white
bodies are so normal as to be seen as almost lacking ethnicity, to Aboriginal Australians
the presence of white bodies is a very visible constant reminder that, as Indigenous
writer Aileen Moreton-Robinson notes, ‘[their] lands were invaded and stolen, [their]
ancestors massacred and enslaved, [their] children taken away and [their] rights denied,
and these acts of terror forged white identity in this country’ (2003, p.67). White
corporeality, Moreton-Robinson continues, ‘is thus one of the myriad ways in which
relations between the colonising past and present are omnipresent.’

‘What do I bring to this place?’ was the question I proposed to the workshop group that
we each ask, as well as listening to the place and inviting its effects upon our bodies. A
memorable response from a workshop member was: ‘I was struggling to clean out my
whole house [in order to let the place in], but maybe I just need to rearrange the
furniture!’ Frank van de Ven responded to my interrogation of the notion of emptiness
with: ‘The more you empty of Gretel, the more Gretel will be able to be seen.’ From
experience, I understand that he meant my spontaneity, intuition and immediacy of

11
expression can more freely emerge when the topsoil of social/ constructed ‘personality’
is pared away, but I believe this spontaneity can be accessed without emptying anything.
In my experience—from my practice and from observing others in my own workshops
and classes, the superficial, social layers of self/ personality tend to drop away anyway,
when one is engaged in embodied listening to a place. By becoming grounded, open to
perceiving one’s surrounds and attentive to one’s body’s perceptual processes, one is
present in the moment, operating from what may be considered intuition or the
instinctual aspect of self, without the need for any violent (or otherwise) abandonment of
identity.

I appreciate the notion of the permeable borders of the body, which van de Ven and
Peter Snow both promote. Permeability suggests seepage between my body and the
world that surrounds it, a softening of the margins—acknowledging the body’s role as a
‘threshold between the social and the natural’, as Grosz advocates. The notion of
permeability does not demand that I am in any way erased or made transparent or
indeed, that the place is in any way erased by my presence. The fluid inter-relation
between body and its surrounds that this permeability encourages is reminiscent of
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological concept of ‘flesh’: the similarity of substance
that softens our perceived separateness from the non-human world (1968). In describing
what he understands as the ‘intertwining’ between the experience of seeing and that
which is seen, Merleau-Ponty identifies that we are separated from ‘the things’ or the
features of the exterior physical world by the ‘thickness of the look and of the body.’ He
does not view this ‘thickness’ as divisive however, but rather as tangibly connective:
‘…the thickness of flesh between the seer and the thing is constitutive for the thing of its
visibility as for the seer of his corporeity; it is not an obstacle between them, it is their
means of communication.’ The body’s ability to see and perceive the world around it is
our means of relating to it and this relationship—the communication that Merleau-Ponty
calls ‘flesh’—is what links us to place. It is a fully embodied, deeply perceiving self that
results from the awareness of ‘flesh’, not an identity that is transcended. I do not believe
the body must first be ‘emptied’ to find this sort of fluid inter-relation whilst dancing in or
with a place—and it is questionable whether this ‘emptiness’ is truly achievable in any
case. The notion of a permeable body in a process of acquainting with place is perhaps
a functional middle ground between the human that presumes she is the dominant (and

12
separate) feature in a place and the empty body that believes she has overthrown or
abandoned the self in order to be inscribed ‘purely’ by the place.

If Body Weather (via Butoh) is built on a philosophy of abandonment, violent

transcendence or emptying of the individual self, it follows that personal expression of
emotion is to be avoided. Here it is pertinent to recall Elizabeth Grosz’s pointed
observations regarding the legacy of Cartesianism. She notes that the line of
investigation that assumes the body to be a signifying medium presumes also the
‘fundamental passivity and transparency of the body’, whereby the specificity of the body
must be neutralised and predicates that its ‘role in forming thoughts, feelings,
emotions…must be ignored.’ American dance educator Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen
describes sensing as being a ‘haven’ from the emotions—a way to get insights but ‘not
such an emotional space’ (1993, p.65). She concludes ‘A lot of sensing work is an
escape from the emotions, it actually represses emotional integration if it’s not balanced.’

Unlike Bainbridge Cohen’s work that ‘balances’ the impartiality of sensing with its
improvisational exploration of the ‘fluid’ system of the body—that corresponds to the
emotions, in Body Weather exercises we attempt to reside exclusively in the detailed
realm of the senses, experiencing sensation without affectation or partiality. I find an odd
deficiency in Body Weather work in that it assumes and develops a permeable,
absorbent body, open to its surrounds, yet does not acknowledge or allow the mutable
emotional area of the self to be seen or witnessed. All external stimuli are allowed into
the body, it would seem, but affects permitted to leave the body are restricted to certain
categories of expression. In my experience of Min Tanaka’s methods with his company
and workshop groups, Body Weather dancers must deal with the emotionality that (I
believe) inevitably arises from the work, outside of practice time. Japanese Butoh and
Body Weather performances (as opposed to their training) often include an emotional
element, in expressing an epic theme of humanity, but this is usually a representation via
the use of imagery, not the dancer’s own personal emotion, and even this emotionality is
often seen only in its restraint or absence. My recent work, on the contrary, in its attempt
to re-dress the repression of white Australian colonial guilt and grief, does not subscribe
to the Japanese mode of emotional restraint, because I believe emotional honesty is a
key to non-Indigenous Australians’ locating of ourselves in our places.

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It was therefore a relief, as well as surprising to me, that Miloš Šejn included feeling in
the experience of perceiving the ‘landscape’ in tasks he offered the Bohemiae Rosa
workshop group. Walking wordlessly through the misty Sumava Forest in South
Bohemia, we arrived at a lake that for a moment I could not comprehend –I thought I
was looking at air that was shimmering a little, like a mirage in the desert. Following
Professor Šejn’s instructions, I walked with care around the fragile bank surrounding the
perfectly reflective surface, holding a piece of paper to my chest, drawing a ‘circle’ with
charcoal as I circumnavigated the circular lake, trying also to express my ‘feelings of
walking’ in the line. Body, place, emotion, perception and expression were brought
together. In another activity, Miloš Šejn’s asked us to draw three vertical lines on a piece
of paper, with eyes closed, whilst standing with the paper against a wall: the first line at
‘your natural speed’, the second ‘slowly’ and the third taking fifteen minutes. We were
instructed to be aware of our own verticality whilst drawing the lines. ‘Be aware also of
how you feel as you draw/ stand.’ I gathered that Šejn included sensation and emotion in
‘feel’. The line makes visible, creates a trace, a mark, of our physical and emotional
experience of standing, of verticality. Šejn’s inclusion of the feeling realm in his corporeal
drawing tasks was a precedent for any Body Weather workshop I have been to. (Indeed
this Bohemiae Rosa project was not officially a ‘Body Weather workshop’, although van
de Ven’s offerings were predominantly Body Weather-based.)

Bohemiae Rosa also focused on the basic human act of walking as we traversed the
Beech and Mountain Ash forests. Butoh and certain forms of postmodern dance explore
walking as a ‘neutral’ or neutralising activity, which Sally Gardner describes as a
fundamental locomotion of the body in kinaesthetic relation to the ground and its
surrounding space—experienced differently yet similarly by both sexes (p.59). Gardner
observes that in verticality and the two-legged walking gait, all humans share ‘with each
other but with no other species’ a similar relationship to gravity (p.49). Fraleigh claims
‘Hokohtai, the impersonal (universalised) “walking body”, is at the root of Butoh. Its grace
arises through method in purifying motion of intention, getting rid of or emptying the self’
(2003, p.177). These walking practices would usually take place in a studio situation, but
I surmise that Frank van de Ven’s walking through the forest was informed by a similar
underpinning philosophy. Van de Ven talked about the borders between our bodies and
the landscape and how they may be mediated and researched via walking. He
suggested a certain openness to change in this liminal zone, a transparency. He asked

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‘How does the landscape walk through you?’ and proposed that we ‘invite’ the place into
us. Van de Ven is interested in ‘how to be in a state that the landscape can speak to
you’. His approach is not from the specificities of his own body and identity, but from the
notion of a transparent or empty body that he believes is the optimum state through
which ‘the landscape can speak to you’. Walking, he implies, is a mode of attaining or
aspiring to this transparency. Like the common ground of language-less-ness (we had
agreed not to speak for the first four days of this workshop), the act of walking across the
land together had an equalising effect on the group. The commonality of becoming a
forest-like collective that was strongly encouraged by these aspects of Bohemiae Rosa
enabled our bodies to enter the site of the forest less cerebrally, giving way to a strong
sensory experience of place that resonated long after the workshop. However this
universalising, like the Hokohtai walk, aligns with the philosophy of emptiness, with its
associated reductionism and devaluing of the body in its totality and its particularity.

Back in Australia, I realised, with a gasp, why the issue of emptiness has been so
persistent for me. In a country where ‘emptiness’ has been the false premise
underscoring dispossession and genocide, the application of Butoh’s empty body as a
starting point for perceiving place is problematic, to say the least. In 1835 Richard
Bourke, the Governor of the colony of New South Wales, implemented the doctrine of
terra nullius: that Australia was an ‘empty land’, or a land that belongs to no-one,
enforcing a fiction that there were no occupants of this country prior to the British Crown
taking possession of it. This legal notion justified ongoing policy and attitudes that denied
Australian Indigenous people (who had lived sustainably on this continent for over forty
thousand years), rights to their own land and recognition of their culture; indeed it denied
their very existence.

There is a lot at stake in the transposition of one cultural form or training onto another
place. While to Frank van de Ven, ‘emptying’ his body is partially a gesture of humility to
place, concerned as he is to ‘transcend the colonial gaze’ (he asks: are you trying to
chase, catch, capture aspects of the landscape, or are you open to inviting it to come to
you?), as a white Australian dancer of/ with Australian places, this starting point is wholly
inappropriate. The amelioration of specificities of one’s body-self identity that is
encouraged by Body Weather practitioners (overtly or by implication) via physical
training, imaging and walking with particular attention/ intention, could be seen, at least

15
in Australia, as reiterating the colonial paradigm of erasure. Additionally, the denial of
emotion that is usual for Body Weather practice, following logically from a body that is
supposedly ‘empty’, also seems inappropriate in a country where the governing race has
been so slow to even apologise for its gross human rights abuses against the
Indigenous peoples. I attempt to bring my whole self-body to meet with the Australian
site, aware of the lineage my pale skin bears, the history it holds and the contemporary
injustice it may still represent to some. I strive for total presence, not self-evasion or
absence—which could be seen to parallel the normalising invisibility of whiteness. To
start from a state of fictitious emptiness would be to re-enact the blindness to the
implications of personal identity my work is seeking to re-dress. By bringing the legacy of
this identity into my own and my audience’s conscious awareness and approaching
Australian places with an openness and desire to find relation anyway, I hope that the
fissure starts to heal. In adopting the notion of the body’s permeable borders, I enable
the transformative possibilities of Butoh’s ‘empty body’, without attempting to overthrow
personal identity. My locating dance is thus aspiring towards fullness, inclusiveness, not
emptiness.

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