Fabulations, transcreations and the spectral turn of Butoh

13 Apr - 14 Apr 2026

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In partnership with KEF, Forum Dança is organising a two-day workshop with researcher Christine Greiner within the framework of the 9th edition of the Advanced Programme in Creations in Performing Arts (PACAP), which also receives support from KEF.  The sessions are aimed at artists, students, researchers, curators, cultural producers and anyone interested in the dialogues between Japan and the West, philosophy of the body and cosmopolitics. Registration is open until 12 April.

 

Module 1 - Fabulations and Transcreations
The workshop proposes an investigation into how art uses the "power of the false" and fabulation not as a break from reality, but as a way of narrating it from plural perspectives. In this sense, the "false" of fabulation is always a construction to deal with opacity. Christine brings these ideas closer to the proposal of "transcreation" by the Brazilian poet and translator Haroldo de Campos, arguing, in an expanded view, that both translating and fabulating are processes that teach us how to "make worlds", working the narrative into the very materiality of bodies, images and events.

Module 2 - The spectral turn of Butoh and its promiscuous strategies
With the book Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (1993), Jacques Derrida opened paths for us to perceive how, far beyond mystical entities, spectres generated by devices of power continue to haunt us, such as capitalism and class struggles. In this talk, Christine will show how Butoh choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata promoted, with his "dance of darkness", a "spectral turn" in the late 1950s in Japan. By creating movements marked by the ambiguity between catastrophe and creation, between living and dead bodies, between subjects and objects, he established a choreographic logic as an operation of intoxication to erode power relations.

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Christine Greiner is an Associate Professor in Communication and Arts at PUC-SP. She teaches in the Postgraduate Programme in Communication and Semiotics, where she coordinates the Centre for Oriental Studies; and in the undergraduate course in Communication of the Arts of the Body. She has been a visiting professor at universities in Japan, the United States and France, with support from the Japan Foundation, the Nichibunken Centre and Capes/Fulbright, among other agencies. She is the author of several books and articles on Japanese culture, contemporary art and body studies. Along with Professor Helena Katz, she co-conceived the "body-media" (corpomídia) theory. She participates as a curator in projects with Ricardo Muniz Fernandes and Hideki Matsuka and collaborates with artists in the visual arts, performance and dance.

 

13 and 14 April
From 2 pm to 5 pm
KEF - Rua de Santa Catarina, 9 Lisbon, ground floor 
Registration here.
Registration fee: 40€ (General Public) and 25€ (KEF friends)