I never had a chance to associate Cubism with butoh until I encountered Pablo Picasso’s painting, Femme en pleursfrom, in person in Tate Modern 2023.
Two human-like figures in white, facing each other, popped up to me intensely, before I figured out the female’s facial expression as a whole. The concept of face is then defamiliarized – an individual muscle could be emotionally charged, carrying the essence of bodily sensations.

Cubist perspective on butoh body
Macdonald (2005:271) quotes Rosenblum (1976) that discerning from the traditional form and space, ‘Cubism substituted a radically new fusion of mass and void’, by the means of representing the ‘interlinked “moments” that comprise the visual experience of moving through a 3D spatial field’ (ibid:265) in a two-dimensional static plane. The perspective of having a combination of different isolating views of a unified object on a single plane is attained by interlinking the partial aspects as if the object is perceived through bodily movement around it in a constitutive perceptual continuum.
Such continuum in the form of defamiliarization of the body, which is likely caused by an alteration and/or deconstruction of the body geometry and anatomy, resonates with Poala Esposito (2013:177), who writes about her understanding of butoh experience on body image: firstly by ‘”isolating” specific body parts (back, ribs, etc.)’, where movement potential is explored. Then, the juxtaposition of body parts with images, territories, et cetera, ‘works in the direction of de-familiarizing and de-contextualizing the body’. In this way, butoh image would ‘undermine the dancers’ “body image” and the perceptual relationships that make up such an image, by creating new, multiple – whilst fleeting – body images’.
Espoito’s portrayal does not only break away from the perception of the figural body in a form of imaginary disfiguration or fragmentation, nor merely a metaphorical image. It is, however, combining the ‘”real” (ribs, spine etc.)’ form with ‘”imaginary” (great wings, beams of light etc.)’ quality (ibid: 176). This relationship shares a similar tone with how Edmund Husserl distinguishes between spatial form and matter (filling),
‘On the one hand we have the corporeal structure and its determinations, such as surface, corner, edge, and on the other hand the qualities which cover and fill the space, for example the colorations […]’ (Husserl, 1997:55).
Husserl also elaborates that the spatial form ‘can be in itself nothing’ (ibid:56) since the constituents are the spatial filling that bears the phenomenological qualities over the form. Macdonald (2005:162-163) agrees and interprets Husserl’s concept (1997): the filling is sensory qualities for instance colour, textures, temperature et cetera that ‘can occur continuously or discretely’ in ‘a perceptual leap’ over the boundary of the spatial form. When the primacy of spatial filling is applied to the kinetic sensations, Husserl even claims that the sensations of movements ‘make possible a presentation without being presentational themselves’ (Husserl, 1997:136).
Apparently, the common ground between Cubism and butoh sits upon the illusion between the enclosed representation (form) and the continuous multiplicity (sensory quality). According to Schwartz, ‘Cubism defined reality as a psychological presence rather than as a set of external appearances’ (Schwartz, 1971, cited in Mallen, 2022:9), through the reflection of an active interest in a multiple perception of an object in the Cubist works. Whereas butoh transmutes the external form of a standard body image into a lived body, perceiving multiple imageries, sensations and/or emotions in the process of ‘becoming’.
Multiplicities of corporeal planes
On top of the integration of form and sensory qualities, what Cubism inspires and furthers my understanding of butoh, or even body, is its intensified shift of corporeal planes in space which adds on a sophisticated layer of corporeality,
‘… with the effect being not a more complete abstraction unmoored from the body, but one that itself unmoors the body, that generalizes and denaturalizes the body’s effects, spreading the “bodily” across the entire face’(Baker, 2021:49)
The idea of unmooring the body aligns with Tatsumi Hijikata’s notion of deconstructing the body which makes a lot of butoh-inspired movements awkward and distorted. The radicality of Hijikata’s works is to ‘reinhabit and reconstruct the body, a body denied and controlled by the rationalism and consumerism of post-war Japan’ (Esposito and Kasai, 2020:256). It is through deconstruction and transformation that the body reaches new possibilities of movement, and the identity becomes wholly of itself. This concept is in line with Paul Waldo Schwartz, who describes Cubism, as ‘the furious motion in the painting [that] prefaces the stillness of the Cubist ideal just as the explosion of a celestial body precedes a new formation of bodies in coordinated movement’ (Schwartz, 1971, cited in Mallen, 2022:11-12).
On one hand, while the paintings in the Cubism style capture the explosive moment in stillness, butoh movements can also be very subtle and the small muscle vibrations could appear motionless. On the other hand, in terms of embodiment, the Cubist explosion could be imagined through the ambiguous oscillation of corporeal planes that leads to potential tension between the surface and the depth of the corporeal planes. Similarly, Antonin Artaud who had much influence on butoh seems to echo such tension, ‘Cubism is a putting into question of the linear occult world, and is even more a matter of the tear of internal tissue’ (University of Victoria / Jay Murphy, no date). Artaud’s claim on Cubism reverberates his proposal about ‘the body without organ’[1], that ‘the human body to be urgently anatomized and reconstructed on an autopsy table’, so the body could dance truthfully ‘in an organ-less “wrong-way-round” frenzy of gesture’ (Barber, 2005:32-33). This idea directly influenced Hijikata’s approach in developing butoh corporeal gesture as ‘an act of anatomical refusal or transformation’ (ibid), reiterating the reassembling of disparate planes of Cubism driven by multiple spatial filling in creating a new anatomy of reality.
An unstable and complex spatial continuum
In Cubism, the oscillation of the fragmented planes thrown and tossed into the void creates a ‘spatial continuum’. As John Golding comments on the figurative works of the Cubist painter, Georges Braque,
‘by rendering the areas between the objects in a tactile, material fashion, [he] succeeds in fusing objects and space into a spatial continuum composed of small, fluid, inter-penetrating planes’ (Golding, 1988, cited in Macdonald, 2005:65).
The field of space between objects seems to be captured in Cubist paintings, but it is constantly evolving around the perceiver’s perspective, through the inter-penetrating planes as it unfolds into the ‘spatial manifold’ (Macdonald, 2005:73). It is in resonance with Ma in butoh, a concept of ‘in-betweenness’ referring to the temporality of time-space. It ‘accords roughly with liminal transitional space or indeterminate time’ (Fraleigh, 2020:480), and ‘exists at the threshold of corporeal experiences’ (Bellerose, 2018:162). Ma flows through the bodies forging a connective awareness of temporality, leading to occasional passive movements in distortion or unexpected involuntary movements resulting from tension release; meanwhile, Cubism offers ‘an unstable structure of dismembered planes in indeterminate spatial positions’ (Macdonald, 2005:71), allowing the undulating fluctuation among the dissected bodily planes.
This is not meant to be an exhaustive investigation of the potential Cubist influence on butoh, but my first attempt to portray Cubism in the realm of kinaesthesia in exploring how an isolated body part could be ‘localized’ whilst extending and broadening the sensing bodily planes in the spatial continuum.
Notes [1] This phrase was used in Antonin Artaud’s play ‘To Have Done With the Judgment of God’ in 1947. https://www.labster8.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Artaud-ToHaveDoneWithJudgementofGod.pdf
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Bibliography:
Books & Journals:
Baker G. (2016) The Body after Cubism. (157), pp34-62. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/OCTO_a_00258.
Barber, S. (2005) Hijikata: revolt of the body. Chicago: Solar Books.Bellerose, C. (2018)
Being Ma: Moonlight Peeing through the Doorway in Fraleigh', S. (Ed.) Back to the Dance Itself: Phenomenologies of the Body in Performance. University of Illinois Press, pp161-179.
Esposito, P. (2013) Butoh dance in the UK: an ethnographic performance investigation, PhD. Thesis, Oxford Brookes University.
Esposito, P.and Kasai T. (2020) ‘Butoh Dance, Noguchi Taiso and Healing’ in Karkou, V., Lycouris, S. and Oliver, S. (Ed.) The Oxford handbook of dance and wellbeing. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 255-272.
Fraleigh, S. (2020) ‘We are not solid beings: Presence in Butoh, Buddhism, and phenomenology’, Asian Theatre Journal, 37(2), pp. 464–489. doi: https://doi.org/10.1353/atj.2020.0037.
Husserl, Edmund, (1997) Thing and Space. Lectures of 1907, Translated by Rojcewicz R., Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Mallen, E. (2022) The Embodiment of Artistic Objects in Pablo Picasso’s Cubism. Arts, 11(32) pp. 1-50. Doi: https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11010032.
Macdonald, P.S. (2005) ‘Husserl and the Cubists on a Thing in Space’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 36 (3), pp.258-276.
Online Reference / Website:
Artaud A. (1947) To Have Done With the Judgment of God https://www.labster8.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Artaud-ToHaveDoneWithJudgementofGod.pdf (Accessed: 10 Mar 2024)
University of Victoria / Jay Murphy (no date) The Artaud Effect https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/ctheory/article/download/15122/6110?inline=1#bio (Accessed: 10 Mar 2024)