This reflective essay draws on Zen Buddhism, phenomenology, and the somatic theory of Nagatomo Shigenori to explore an eco-somatic approach to butoh, a metamorphic dance form that emerged in Japan after World War II amid ecological and social crisis. Butoh is not progressive; it admits suffering and seeks to clear the mind, akin to Buddhism's 'no mind' and phenomenology's clearing of habitual predispositions. The essay discusses butohist Nakajima Natsu's teaching of presence as a practice of becoming nothing. The author, a butoh student, performer, and scholar since 1985, uses descriptive, performative methods focused on first-person lived experience, aiming toward discovery rather than objective claims.
Phenomenology, butoh dance, and Zen Buddhism share overlapping views on everyday experience, perception, and how actions create a world. Drawing on the author's decades of practice and scholarship, the essay uses descriptive, experiential methods to explore consciousness, embodiment, and the ecosomatic turn inward. It articulates how butoh, arising from post-war Japan's ecological and social crisis, illuminates the performance of everyday life through concepts like "worlding" from Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. The writing is performative and concerned with lived experience and how features of experience appear and transform in consciousness.