I wasn't at the performance but am intrigued by several of the points that you raise Deborah. For instance, given that the audience was comprised largely of academics, and because butoh is both an avant-garde and non-western form of movement, I can see where this would lead to a presentation that might feel more like an exotification of butoh itself rather than an opportunity for people to engage directly with the experience of viewing it.

To exotify something is to exalt it, objectify it, rather than to directly relate to it. When something foreign (and especially because foreign-ness makes people feel uncomfortable) is introduced, the natural tendency is to try to parse it, explain it, so that one can feel an ability to relate to it. Academics, by nature and training, use deductive reasoning to parse the essence of nearly everything. This is true for nearly all but a few special thinkers from any institution or field (of course there are the great creative geniuses who are different). It is antithetical to an academic framework to engage in nonlinear thought/experience most of the time. This is why I left academics. yuck.

Further, when a subject matter refuses to be parsed and delineated in such a way as butoh, it is not surprising that there would be even more of an effort put forth to do just this. butoh is not exotic, but something we each have inside of ourselves. Part of discovering this is allowing ourselves to admit that we cannot lead this process, something academics loathe.

It is no wonder it was such a dry performance given that framework.

There is a prejudice amongst academic and quasi-academic organizations that all aesthetic movements must be justified before hand with a theory. There are many factors involved, one of which was the tendency in the twentieth century for artists to issue manifestos. The other tendency amongst academics is to place a movement into the museum or conservatory-- and if the theory is hard to establish, then they need to establish the history or pedigree to justify the inclusion in their minds.

If the Japan Society was so concerned about providing an explanation as to what we were experiencing, I would have prefered that they presented it in the playbill, as is done with most productions at the ART-- in which the dramaturg writes some sort of justification as to the unconventional staging of the traditional repetoire.

I suspect that the lecture was more for the Japan Society members' benefit-- I suspect that they are traditionalists in their areas of study.