Creative absences

Abstract

Seeking to affirm life as a feature of "empty space," Alfred North Whitehead points to life as a process of "between," in which process-thinking sees all reality as an interconnected whole. This means that a "living society" is one that includes some "living occasions" that flow through the void. For the Hijikata Tatsumi butoh the empty state comprises the pre-movement. The body in the butoh is always process, unfinished, perishable, and indistinct of gender and the place where it is and eternally in crisis. Both his ambivalence and his absences are part of his construction and make it unique. The butoh consists precisely in dancing a life with a void. In his workSick Dancer, we find insects, fungi, a description of small sensations of everything that touched or penetrated the body of his childhood. However, its purpose is not only to describe micropayments and micromovements or their childhood memories, but also to restore the genesis of dance, which is the process itself of life and death. It is not coincidence that he mingles with the sick, the disabled, or the women. Hijikata seeks to reach an abstract dimension that enlarges the senses and where the feelings are transformed. Considering Whitehead's theory of feeling, in which we respond to things in the first place, feeling them and only then identifying and recognizing them. Or, what emotions do not cause bodily states, but rather, bodily states come first, and emotions emerge from them. How, a philosophy of the body, the immediate experience that look into the seeing eye and the hand it touches, as Hijikata has taught us, is the only possible justification for any thought? Its starting point is nothing more than the analytical observation of the components of that experience, the emotions themselves. Life and death, absence and presence, light and shadow, the exhausted body, the fragility as an engine, is nothing more than the fragility sought to dance life containing the void.