Stephen Barber

I have recently become acquainted with a young Taiwanese butoh dancer, and I read this book to learn more about his art.

Butoh was started by the dancer Hijikata in the ruins of a bombed out Tokyo in the years immediately after WW2, although it only really came to prominence in the uneasy years of the 60’s when Tokyo was hit by student protests against Japan’s continued domination by American consumerism and militarism. As such, it is borne of death and carries the smell of revolt.

Hijikata speaks of his ideal audience as being composed of the dead, and his gestures arise from the gestures of the dying.

I would like to have a person who has already died, die over and over inside my body…I may not know death, but it knows me.

Butoh is paradox, because….

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I found this biography extremely readable, although at times overly laudatory of White's work. Barber is interesting in how he describes the details of White's life and writing, discussing his sexual involvements, to the layers of character and memory in his books, to the details of White's various apartments in his somewhat transient life. It is clear that Edmund White's writing is most important to Barber, as seen through the close reading he gives to each one of White's publications. White rails against the institutionalization of gay writing as a "cause" due to the AIDS crisis, and also seems to want to resist being "contained" or institutionalized himself; Barber, however, differs from the novelist in this way, continually returning to recurring themes of White's life and writing in an attempt to understand him better. There are places in the book where Barber writes as if he is right by White's side: the detailing of White's lover's last days in Morocco before his death from AIDS is unflinchingly portrayed. White is an interesting study in different facets of the self: a writer who could crank out journalism but worked slowly over his fiction; a man who continues to live with HIV and who claims that his writing and his leisurely life pace keep him well; and a hedonist who speaks equally eloquently about love and loss.… (más)