Embodying the Paradox: Butoh-fu as a non-representational system of embodied temporality

Eleni Kolliopoulou

doi:10.21476/PP.2025.102557

Abstract

This article examines Butoh-fu as a non-representational system of embodied temporality that operates through image, sensation, and affect rather than codified choreographic instruction. Originating in Tatsumi Hijikata’s practice, Butoh-fu is approached here not as notation in a strict sense, but as a field of paradoxical, image-based prompts that generate shifting states of perception through reorganising the performer’s experience of time-space. This shift, as argued by Sondra Fraleigh, is expected to affect also the spectators. Bringing Butoh-fu into dialogue with Nishida Kitarō, the article situates these image-worlds within a relational ontology in which subject and environment are co-constitutive, and temporality emerges as layered, discontinuous, and embodied. Rather than treating time as linear or measurable, this framework foregrounds experiential temporality as something enacted through bodily transformation and perceptual modulation. In conversation with performance theorists Peggy Phelan and André Lepecki, and by reflecting on ritual transformation by Byung-Chul Han, the article argues that Butoh-fu operates as a threshold system that destabilises representational habits of perception. Drawing on practice-based research, it proposes that Butoh-fu enables a mode of embodied thinking. Under this perspective, Butoh performers and spectators are drawn into an anti-structural time-space where perception itself becomes the site of dramaturgical action.

Author Biography

Eleni Kolliopoulou

Eleni Kolliopoulou (Athens) is a mixed-media visual/performance artist and researcher particularly interested in the intersection between performance and philosophy. She studied at the University Kapodistriaka of Athens in the Department of Methodology, History, and Theory of Science (1998-2003, BA). She moved to Italy in September 2007 to attend the Philip Radice School of Physical Theater. Between 2008 and 2013 she accomplished her BA and MA degree by the Academy of Fine Arts of Turin. She was in Germany (Hochscuele Burg Gibiechestein Halle an der Saale) as an Erasmus student for the academic year 2011-2012. Eleni was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy for her practice-based PhD research at Ulster University (Northern Ireland, UK) in March 2020. Her research concerned the use of Butoh body notion in immersive performative installations. Eleni pursued an H.F.R.I. funded post-doctoral research project hosted by Ionian University, Department of Audio-visual arts, 2022-2024 (GR). She has been an adjunct lecturer at University of the Peloponnese, Department of Performing and Digital Arts during 2021-2022, 2024-2025 and 2025-2026.

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