Dominique Savitri Bonarjee will present her book Butoh, as Heard by a Dancer (Routledge, 2024). This monograph is the outcome of a five-year embodied research project carried out in Japan, grounded in the model of direct transmission, in which learning takes place through long-term close proximity between student and teacher, and through the cultivation of subtle forms of understanding beyond words.

During this period, Bonarjee studied with first- and second-generation Butoh dancers and artists, as well as contemporary practitioners engaging with Butoh today. In her writing, she seeks to convey the sensitive somatics of these encounters. Her research involved listening and dancing with figures including Yoshito Ohno, Natsu Nakajima, Yukio Waguri, Ko Murobushi, Moe Yamamoto, Masaki Iwana and philosopher Kuniichi Uno, alongside a new generation of dancers reshaping Butoh’s legacy.

In this talk, Bonarjee will reflect on how Butoh continues to inform her multidisciplinary artistic practice. She will introduce Butoh Mutations, an ongoing research project through which she develops new methodologies and pedagogies for imagining a contemporary and planetary ‘rebellion of the body’, inspired by the visceral activism at the heart of Butoh’s post-war emergence.

About the contributor

Dominique Savitri Bonarjee

Dominique Savitri Bonarjee is a dancer and interdisciplinary artist-scholar working at the intersection of movement, sound, materiality and computational technologies. She completed a PhD in Art at Goldsmiths, University of London (2024). Her doctoral research, Space of the Nameless, develops process- and chance-based methodologies for artistic research, grounded in somatic and spiritual practices drawn from established wisdom traditions.

She is the author of Butoh, as Heard by a Dancer (Routledge, 2024). Through her artistic practice and teaching, she elaborates and transmits the aesthetics of non-rational ways of knowing. Her decade-long performance series Collapse began on the day she left Japan and continues to be staged internationally as a ritual of contemporary exhaustion, unfolding across public spaces, universities and financial districts.

She continues to develop a contemporary movement practice for facing our current era of crisis through her pedagogical research project Butoh Mutations. Her artwork and research have been presented internationally