Dancing hors sujet : On butoh and autism.

Butoh dance – an avant-garde dance 'form' which emerged in Japan in the early 1960s – has been discussed by various scholars in terms of the deconstruction or the unlearning of the social body. In this article, written from my perspective as an autistic butoh dancer, I offer a reflection on the relationship between the autistic body and the butoh body – or rather, I offer a reflection on the relationship between (my) autistic body and (my) butoh body, though I argue that butoh and autism precisely call into question the (neurotypical) assumptions embedded in this sentence. That is, I believe that butoh and autism call into question both the existence of 'the body' as a pre-existing form and the notion that it would be the property of an 'I', of a subject, of a unified self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]