Dance Studies Colloquium: Rosemary Candelario, University of Texas at Austin

“Butoh Ecologies: Dancing with Nature as Embodied Ecological Praxis”

Butoh Ecologies is a multisite case study that uses dance training and performance to research embodied practices that address one of the fundamental issues underlying climate change: humans’ evident inability to see their own futures as inextricably linked to that of their environment. Butoh offers a rich field in which to investigate ecological practices because it is fundamentally about the transformation of the dancing body into something else: a tree, an animal, a mythic creature. Addressing a variety of artists and training projects, this talk argues that butoh practices cultivate a radically reordered corporeality that challenges anthropocentrism, a bodily sensitivity to connections constituted by the ecology itself, and an embodied and practiced ecological consciousness fundamentally attuned to interdependence.

This event is open to the public and part of AIR.

Arts Interdisciplinary Research (AIR) is a holistic research center and forum for creative and scholarly research across the arts that includes cutting-edge colloquia, exploratory seminars, lecture demonstrations, launches of research publications and creative works, reading groups, faculty talks, and stand-alone conferences initiated by the faculty of the Center for the Performing and Cinematic Arts.