Immanent Imitations, Animal Affects: From Hijikata Tatsumi to Marcus Coates

Abstract

As a whole, this third chapter is primarily concerned with the theatre of immanence as a site of bodily experimentation, an event of metamorphosis for performer and audience alike, particularly in the encounter with nonhuman animals. These concerns will be explored primarily through an examination of the performance practice of butoh co-founder Hijikata Tatsumi and the work of the contemporary artist Marcus Coates, alongside Deleuze and Guattari’s well known concept of ‘becoming-animal’. As Alain Beaulieu has summarized,

Animals are omnipresent in Deleuze’s work, and throughout Deleuze and Guattari’s common body of work: the tick’s world, the assemblage (agencement) of the wasp and orchid, the spider’s prehension of the fly, the cat who knows better than the human how to die, the multiplicity of the wolf, the affects of Little Hans’ horse, spiny lobsters’ nomadism and bird-artists. (Beaulieu 2011: 69)