Performing Everyday Things: Ecosomatic Threads of Butoh, Phenomenology, and Zen
Performance Matters April 9, 2024 Sondra Fraleigh 1 citation
Phenomenology, butoh dance, and Zen Buddhism share overlapping views on everyday experience, perception, and how actions create a world. Drawing on the author's decades of practice and scholarship, the essay uses descriptive, experiential methods to explore consciousness, embodiment, and the ecosomatic turn inward. It articulates how butoh, arising from post-war Japan's ecological and social crisis, illuminates the performance of everyday life through concepts like "worlding" from Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. The writing is performative and concerned with lived experience and how features of experience appear and transform in consciousness.