Bodies without hierarchy: the intellectual lives of women dancers in postwar Japan

Thesis

‘Bodies Without Hierarchy: The Intellectual Lives of Women Dancers in Postwar Japan’ focuses on a group of women dancers from the early postwar to the late 1970s. In this dissertation, I articulate a body of knowledge shared by these historical actors, and in doing so, create an entirely different perspective on how ordinary bodies experienced postwar Japan.

The ideas of these dancers created a knowledge system that I call the ‘non-hierarchical body’. These dancers saw everyone’s physical body as the way to understand the world, and that those bodies usually hidden from view should be given attention. Those bodies hidden from view, which I call ‘peripheral bodies’, where those bodies deemed disabled, non-male, or part of the ura, those considered from the low-class or underground parts of society, such as criminals, sex workers, and burakumin. The historical actors here gave those missing bodies attention. Moreover, these dancers all embodied the idea that to make the body the central source of knowledge, one needs to ‘stop thinking’ –become unconscious, become an object, or annihilate ‘the self’. Once one moved without thinking, one had the potential to become anything, in a world in which one’s role was rigidly defined.

I trace how this non-hierarchical body was conceived in early postwar Japan, developed in the 1960s and was popularised by women dancers in the 1970s. Finally, my method and conception allow me to identify that there was a transnational circulation of these ideas, and I follow those to show how and why this form of dance came to appeal to every body.

Authors: Baldock, ABS

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-9rzz4691q
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: dance; postwar; butoh; women; Japan; transnational; gender
• Subjects: Dance; History