Emotional Waves: Butoh and Contemporary Dance brings Claude Hofer’s black-and-white photography into sustained contact with two distinct yet intersecting performance traditions. Made over ten years of travel across several countries, the work encompasses more than one hundred artists associated with Japanese butoh and contemporary dance. Its scale gives the book the character of a long-form study rather than a record of a single company, venue, or season.
The dancers performed specifically for Hofer’s camera. This premise shifts the photographs away from conventional stage documentation: movement is shaped for the photographic encounter, and the decisive exchange occurs between performer and image-maker. Hofer concentrates on the dancers themselves, attending to gesture, posture, facial expression, and the charged instant in which physical action appears inseparable from an interior state. The intense monochrome treatment further reduces distraction, allowing bodies, space, and emotion to carry the pictures.
Bringing butoh and contemporary dance within one photographic project also creates a comparative field without forcing the forms into equivalence. Butoh’s Japanese lineage and contemporary dance’s international breadth remain distinct, while their proximity makes visible shared concerns with embodied expression and the relationship between body and mind. Hofer’s photographs approach dance not only as choreography but as a succession of unstable forms—actions that exist briefly before the camera converts them into still images.
Published by Kehrer Verlag in 2025 as a 304-page hardcover, Emotional Waves deserves attention from collectors concerned with dance, performance, and sustained photographic inquiry. Its significance lies less in documenting celebrated productions than in the breadth and consistency of its encounter with performers across genres and borders. The book preserves a decade of camera-specific performances while examining a fundamental problem of dance photography: how a fixed image might retain the emotional pressure of movement.
