An Empty Room is a transformative journey through butoh, an avant-garde form of performance art that originated in Japan in the late 1950's and is now a global phenomenon. This is the first book about butoh authored by a scholar-practitioner who combines personal experience with ethnographic and historical accounts alongside over twenty photos. Author Michael Sakamoto traverses butoh dance history from its roots in post-World War II Japan to its diaspora in the West in the 1970s and 1980s. An Empty Room delves into the archive of butoh dance, gathering testimony from multiple generations of artists active in Japan, the US, and Europe. The book also creatively highlights seminal visual and written texts, especially Hosoe Eikoh's photo essay, "Kamaitachi," and Hijikata Tatsumi's early essays. Sakamoto ultimately fashions an original view of what butoh has been, is and, more importantly, can be through the lens of literary criticism, photo studies, folklore, political theory, and his experience performing, photographing, teaching, and lecturing in 15 countries worldwide.

This volume collects academic as well as artistic explorations highlighting historical and contemporary approaches to the "energetic" in its aesthetic and political potential. Energetic processes cross dance, performance art and installations. In contemporary dance and performance art, energetic processes are no longer mere conditions of form but appear as distinct aesthetic interventions. They transform the body, evoke specific states and push towards intensities.International contributors (i.e. Gerald Siegmund, Susan Leigh Foster, Lucia Ruprecht) unfold thorough investigations, elucidating maneuvers of mobilization, activation, initiation, regulation, navigation and containment of forces as well as different potentials and promises associated with the "energetic".

Modeling a disability culture perspective on performance practice toward socially just futures In Eco Soma, Petra Kuppers asks readers to be alert to their own embodied responses to art practice and to pay attention to themselves as active participants in a shared sociocultural world. Reading contemporary performance encounters and artful engagements, this book models a disability culture sensitivity to living in a shared world, oriented toward more socially just futures. Eco soma methods mix and merge realities on the edges of lived experience and site-specific performance. Kuppers invites us to become moths, sprout gills, listen to our heart's drum, and take starships into crip time. And fantasy is central to these engagements: feeling/sensing monsters, catastrophes, golden lines, heartbeats, injured sharks, dotted salamanders, kissing mammoths, and more. Kuppers illuminates ecopoetic disability culture perspectives, contending that disabled people and their co-conspirators make art to live in a changing world, in contact with feminist, queer, trans, racialized, and Indigenous art projects. By offering new ways to think, frame, and feel "environments," Kuppers focuses on art-based methods of envisioning change and argues that disability can offer imaginative ways toward living well and with agency in change, unrest, and challenge. Traditional somatics teach us how to fine-tune our introspective senses and to open up the world of our own bodies, while eco soma methods extend that attention toward the creative possibilities of the reach between self, others, and the land. Eco Soma proposes an art/life method of sensory tuning to the inside and the outside simultaneously, a method that allows for a wider opening toward ethical cohabitation with human and more-than-human others.

As war is declared can The Variety Girls keep smiling through...Cleethorpes - September 1939 Struggling to keep their spirits up as the reality of war hits home and theatres are closed, friends Jessie Delaney and Frances O'Leary search for work to see them through until they can sing and dance again. Frances, once upon a time followed her dreams of becoming a dancer but soon found herself with a broken heart and a precious secret when her lover abandoned her. Keeping her secret from her friends grows more difficult as time passes and their friendship grows.. But with her lover returning to England from a successful tour of America, how long will it be before the truth comes to light? Secrets aren't good for anyone and Frances isn't the only one hiding things from her friends. Ginny Thomspon, another Variety Girl is hoping for the best. But is hope enough? Can the Variety Girls pull together to help each other through the tough times or will their secrets tear them apart? A gritty and heart-warming saga perfect for readers of Elaine Everest, Nancy Revell and Pam Howes. Praise for Tracy Baines: 'A charming, heart-warming saga about ambition, hard work and courage in the cut and thrust of a world often driven by jealousy and spite'. Rosie Clarke 'Immerse yourself in the exciting, evocative world of Wartime musical theatre. I highly recommend this book.' Fenella Miller 'An emotional, entertaining read that had me gripped!' Sheila Riley 'An absorbing and poignant saga. I loved it from the very beginning and would highly recommend it...' Elaine Roberts 'Terrific - beautifully written. The book twinkles. A well-crafted and satisfying story' Maisie Thomas 'A pleasure from start to finish.' Glenda Young '...you will have to read this well-researched song and dance of a novel in great gulps as I did' Annie Clark 'I just loved this book! Molly Walton The Variety Girls is terrific - beautifully written & with an unusual background. The stage costumes twinkle with sequins and the book twinkles with tiny details of theatre life that add depth and atmosphere to this well-crafted and satisfying story. Maisie Thomas, The Railway Girls 'A pleasure from start to finish.' Glenda Young, Belle of the Backstreets '...you will have to read this well-researched song and dance of a novel in great gulps as I did' Milly Adams 'an evocative, busy, entertaining read, which has well balanced touches of humour, vying with angst, and of course, more than a dollop of tension.' Margaret Graham, Frost Magazine 'Characterisation is one of the book's strong points - the individual characters stay in your mind long after you finish the story.' Barbara Dynes, The Voice