Performing Everyday Things: Ecosomatic Threads of Butoh, Phenomenology, and Zen
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay engages descriptive, experiential methods of phenomenology, prompts from butoh, and insights of Zen Buddhism. Butoh is the dance and theatre form that arose from the ashes of Japan in the shadow of ecological and social crisis after the Second Word War. It is interpreted widely in current forms that extend well beyond the borders of Japan. The everyday is articulated in the phenomenology of Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, particularly through concepts of “worlding,” how our works ripple out to create a world, as phenomenology and Zen both hold, each in their own way. I write about butoh through a prism of Zen and phenomenology because they share similar philosophical outlooks on performance, and they explain everyday things. In articulating performance of the everyday, this essay takes an ecosomatic turn inward toward matters of consciousness and perception. The writing stems from my participation in butoh as a student, performer, and scholar since 1985, my university teaching of dance and somatics, and my philosophical and lived investigations of phenomenology and Buddhism. Through phenomenology, the essay is descriptive, performative, and concerned with “lived experience,” including how features of experience appear and transform in consciousness.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.052 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".