Standing Up: Urban Butoh Project
The 6-month collaboration between visual anthropologist Shannon Turner and butoh dancer Stefano Taiuti began in the mid-pandemic summer of 2020, as the lockdown restrictions initially eased in Berlin. In a challenging period of precarity and stillness on both the personal and societal level, Turner and Taiuti’s experiment emerged from a shared desire to re-engage with the world and the creative process in a time of closed arts spaces and limited opportunities.
Butoh dancer Taiuti improvised intuitive choreographies in public spaces in Berlin while Turner engaged experimental visual and sensory ethnographic methods, in a shared cine-dance exploring the relationship of the butoh body to urban landscape and architecture: how the body is transformed by these infrastructural impositions and can in turn transform the social and aesthetic conventions of public spaces. More broadly, their project contributes to an inquiry of how bodies co-exist in urban spaces, which bodies are considered legitimate, and how individual disruption of the habitual might contaminate and proliferate on a collective scale.
The pair find inspiration in the concept of ruderal ecologies: resilient species of plants that grow in rubble and human-disturbed environments. Living in the once-destroyed city of Berlin, in an era that has been referred to by scholars as the “ruins of late capitalism”, Turner and Taiuti situate their collaborative practice in a queer ruderal ecology that spontaneously bursts forth through cracks in the urban facade, reclaiming territory colonised by concrete and ordered pedestrian pathways. The ritual transmutation of the butoh body interrogates cultural norms of time, form, and movement in social space, suggesting the possibility different kinds of bodies and temporalities through attunement to sensations of the present.
One of the founders of butoh, Tatsumi Hijikata said that, “butoh is a corpse standing straight up in a desperate bid for life.” Traditionally performed on stage, taken into the context of urban public spaces, butoh becomes an interventionist practice. For Taiuti and Turner, this project became a means of ‘standing up’ amid the chaos of the pandemic - personally, artistically, and politically.
The project was further explored in the Inkubator Collective Residency Vol. 2 , a 2-month research residency and group exhibition at Dada Post Berlin.