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

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.