Becoming A Frame

The title of Michael Sakamoto’s theory-rich, butoh-informed auto-ethnography An Empty Room refers to the cyclical relationship between form and emptiness found in Zen Buddhism. This seemingly paradoxical perception, where form is emptiness and emptiness form, describes the transformative relation between identity and potential that Sakamoto convincingly asserts can be accessed through butoh-based theory-in-practice (p. 106). An empty room—understood as a bodily space created in the process of performance—is “an ambivalent space with no clearly attainable state of being on which to hold or depend, but one that is also potentialized” (p. 116). Butoh founder Hijikata Tatsumi explored this space as a collision of socio-cultural forces, individual experience, and historical memory, which activates creative agency in self-formation. Sakamoto writes toward this self with knowledge and humility, placing his life experiences and lines of artistic inquiry into dialogue with Hijikata’s principles. The text digs deeply into butohbased philosophy and its application to bodily research, an approach largely absent from other English-language butoh scholarship. Despite its increasingly global presence, butoh remains something of an enigma to Westerners. Developed in Japan throughout the 1960s and ‘70s by Hijikata, Ashikawa Yoko, Ohno Kazuo, and Kasai Akira, this art form centers paradox and ambiguity as strategies for negotiating frictional dualities like East and West, self and other, and nature and culture. Integrating these dualities into embodied actions manifests compelling images that became familiar to Western audiences in the 1980s through the touring of Ohno Kazuo and Sankai Juku, and the circulation of several photo books. Sakamoto, a practitioner-scholar and photographer, marks his early affective encounter with butoh through the impact of such imagery (p. 17). He develops this encounter using Roland Barthes’s notion of the punctum: “that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)”