Fabulations of Traditional Japan

Abstract This chapter by Christine Greiner presents relevant examples of how contemporary Japanese dance engages with cultural traditions while embodying a critical stance on key political issues through fabulation. In analysing the creative processes of key Japanese choreographers, Greiner emphasizes that fabulation is a strategy to provoke critical movements beyond pre-established categories and stagnant identities. Moreover, fabulation offers a means of rethinking the past by introducing new possibilities for encounter and the displacement of embodied images and narratives, ultimately choreographing new possibilities for political existence. She observes that contemporary Japanese dance artists, drawing on stories, images, and traditional aesthetics, create their own fabulation, fuelled by the embodied power of fictional realities, to propose new spaces of visibility and power to engage with the past while projecting fresh paths and questions towards the future. This use of the past is not about reconstructing specific models of dance but rather about reenacting emotions and thoughts, engaging in processes of imagination and movement to reinvent their bodies and the contexts in which they move.