Butoh Dance
‘Imagine there’s a thread travelling up through the centre of your head, it’s drawing a massive circle on the ceiling as you move. Become aware of the space above you and around you, that awareness is like a big all-seeing eye…now move backwards around the room keeping the same pace, the thread extends from your back and you can now see everything above and behind you…’
Last week I attended my first ever Butoh dance class and this was the warm up…it got a lot lot weirder, but was an incredibly interesting experience.
I know very little about this dance form but had met the teacher a while back and was utterly blown away with her mesmerising performances. When performing it’s like she is a puppet, being moved and transformed by some other force. At the time I had been working on my series of the mountain paintings and her performance really struck a chord with the paintings (delicate puppet mountains moved, transformed and held by forces in the intense black surroundings).
I joined the class to find out more about the dance form and was particularly interested in finding out how Butoh dancers explore the relationship of the body to it’s environment. I’m planning on going every week so with any luck my experience and understanding of this fascinating dance form will grow and with it my understanding of their relationship of body-environment.
In Butoh there is a close link between the body and it’s surroundings, they are said to be intimately connected. The body doesn’t move on impulse but is moved by an impulse and for this to work the dancer needs to become acutely aware of their environment and ‘await’ an impulse. Here the body hangs like an empty vessel, without intention.
‘The empty body does not move intentionally. It is rather moved by something. The body is a blank canvas subject to infinite transformations. The body is a black charcoal absorbing the light. “What is expressed should not be something that a dancer tries to display. A dancer should concentrate on absorbing.” ( Nario Gohda from Yukio Waguri’s site: http://www.otsukimi.net/koz/e_yw_antho.html )
see http://www.florenciaguerberof.com/butoh_research/Butoh_Research_Project.html
Rather than visualising concepts or feelings, in Butoh, the dancer becomes the feeling of that thing from the inside out. This was an interesting thing to try and grasp, when it happens in a dancer you fully believe and feel their moving body, without it happening it’s like there’s some sort of disconnection, no matter how beautiful the movement it doesn’t ‘move’ you. Similarly when moving, when I’m consciously trying to ‘feel’ a movement it always feels forced, but when it’s actually ‘felt’ the movement follows naturally.
