ResDance Series 11: Episode 2: Finding Home in The Body: Intuition, Belonging & Butoh Dance with Dominique Bonarjee
In this episode, Dominique shares her journey into Butohand reflects on how her heritage, travels, and lived experiences have shaped her creative practice. We explore the body as a site of memory and belonging, and how movement has become a way of finding an internal sense of home. Dominique discusses her intuitive, site-responsive approach to making work, revealing how she listens to and collaborates with the spaces she inhabits. She shares insights into her Collapse series, her interdisciplinary practice, and her interest in creating conditions where movement can emergethrough both doing and non-doing. We also talk about her recently published monograph, the role of collaboration, the relationship between body, space, and audience, and the value of working with uncertainty. It's a thoughtfulconversation about embodiment, creativity, and the transformative potential of movement.
Biography
Dominique Savitri Bonarjee is an Indian-French artist, dancer, and researcher working across choreography, sound, electronic instruments, and visual art. For her, dance is a"rebellion of the body" and a practice of "(more-than-) humanrehabilitation." Drawing on postwar Butoh, ritual practices, and contemplative traditions, her work explores the body as a site of continual transformation amid ecological, technological, and social change. Her monograph Butoh, as Heard by a Dancer (Routledge, 2024) documents encounters with seminal Japanese performance artists, while herdoctoral project Space of the Nameless (Goldsmiths, 2024)developed an embodied research methodology transmitted through artistic scores for exploring nondual attention in creative practice.
Alongside performances and pedagogical projects, Dominique creates site-responsive installations and participatory works presented in galleries, festivals, and research contexts internationally. Her decade-long performance action COLLAPSE is a poetic choreography of exhaustion and rest in the context of acceleration, burnout, and polycrisis, while her ongoing project Butoh Mutations reimagines Butoh's radical postwar legacy for contemporary bodies and conditions. Dominique’s enduring fascination with intuition and the transformative potential of the unknown is deeply informed by Taoist martial arts practices and Sufi dance.
Contact details
Website: Spaceofthenameless.art
Website: Butoh.co.uk
Social Media
@spaceofthenameless
@butoh_mutations
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominique-savitri-bonarjee/
Resources of interest
https://www.routledge.com/Butoh-as-Heard-by-a-Dancer/Bonarjee/p/book/9780367631192#
Please share this episode with students, educators, practitioners, performers, and interdisciplinary researchers curious to learn more about dance research in action.
