Body Weather is a comprehensive approach to training and performance that investigates the intersections of bodies and their environments. Bodies are conceived not as fixed and separate entities but as constantly changing – just like the weather. Weather is seen as a complex system of forces and influences coursing through and beyond bodies and the world. The term & philosophical basis for Body Weather was founded in the early 1980s by dancer Min Tanaka and further developed by Laboratories worldwide.
Here is in an incomplete list of resources to read/see/hear more. Several resources are behind paywalls and accessible through universities.
Min Tanaka website http://www.min-tanaka.com/wp/?page_id=1412
Tess de Quincy. 2021. Body Weather bodies in the outback – Lake Mungo. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19443927.2021.1943505
Masato Okada. 2007. (photographs, followed Tanaka for 30+ years) https://www.kousakusha.co.jp/E/ISBN978-4-87502-400-2.html
Jonathan Marshall. 2006. Dancing the Elemental Body: Butoh and Body Weather: Interviews with Tanaka Min and Yumi Umiumare. http://www.performanceparadigm.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/6marshall.pdf
Bruce Baird. 2022. (Chapter 13) Tanaka (in Butoh book). https://academic.oup.com/book/41887/chapter-abstract/354725413?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Zack Fuller in Bruce Baird and Rosemary Candelario. 2019. The Routledge Companion to Butoh. (Chapter 50) Tanaka Min: the dance of life.
Bonnie Sue Stein and Min Tanaka. 1986. Min Tanaka: Farmer/Dancer or Dancer/Farmer. Interview. The Drama review.
Jonathan Marshall. 2006. Dancing the elemental body. https://www.performanceparadigm.net/index.php/journal/article/view/18
Joa Hug (2020) ‘Propositions for Unfinished Thinking: the research scores as a medium of artistic research. PhD research https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/433112/596407
Seigo Matsuoka and Min Tanaka. Conscious body, contagious mind. (Japanese) 2013 (?). Extract / info https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/433112/616170
Min Tanaka. 1986. “From” I Am an Avant-Garde Who Crawls the Earth: Homage to Tatsumi Hijikata. The Drama Review: TDR, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Summer, 1986), pp. 153-155. https://doi.org/10.2307/1145735
About Min Tanaka https://performingarts.jpf.go.jp/en/article/7165/
Frank van de Ven. 2023. Interviews with improvisers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8uWEyV-ENk
Peter Snow and Frank van de Ven. 2008. (Chapter 12) in Gay McAuley’s Unstable Ground: Performance and the Politics of Place.
Neil Callaghan, 2008, MA thesis (unpublished), Lancaster University. Cultivating Culture, Environ-mental Bodies: body weather and Guattari’s three ecologies
If you type Body Weather Min Tanaka into Youtube there are many archival videos freely available.
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