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On 10 September 1985, four near-naked, powder-white bodies were in the process of being gradually lowered from Seattle's Mutual Life bank building on the corner of First Avenue and Yessler Way. Suspended by their ankles high above a gathered crowd, these butoh dancers from the company Sankai Juku were beginning "Sholiba' — a slow 30-minute descent to the ground — when one of the ropes broke, sending the body of Yoshiyuki Takada hurtling 80 feet to the pavement, where he died instantly. Dance theorist Michelle Dent, who witnessed this event, has written that many in the crowd "gasped and clung to the possibility that this was not a human being lying at our feet, but a simulation, some sort of macabre and tricked up theatrical dummy' (2004, p. 129). In this moment held between death and its mimesis, Dent maintains, the audience on the street occupied a "liminal space'. In The Ritual Process, Victor Turner rendered liminal space as a caesura where time and place are suspended and spectators inhabit a gap "between two thresholds, between two worlds' (Dent, 2004, p. 178): between the everyday and the staged spectacle: between the threat of danger and its inevitable promise. Sankai Juku's director Ushio Amagatsu referred to this interstitial condition when he wrote, three years before the Seattle accident, "Butoh belongs both to life and death. It is a realization of the distance between a human being and the unknown' (quoted in Hoffman & Holborn, 1987, p. 121). The liminal experience of theatrical death on the city pavement is both psychic and spatial as it involves that literal gap between a risk of falling and its credible realisation.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137410276_4

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