BUTOH DANCE
Empty Body
You want to create space in your body in order to be moved. It means having a relaxed body, a clear mind, a sensitive, a receptive body – an empty body. Wich doesn’t mean it stays empty of energy or images, no, it’s a starting place, a place from wich you can find your dance, trying to find something wich is true to yourself. It does not mean escaping yourself, rather recognizing that your self is bigger than your think.
Movements
Every movement you do – whether it’s choreographed or improvised – needs to come from an internal impulse, finding an impulse inside you to move. You don’t want to move in the idea of an image, you want to let the energy of the image move your body. There isn’t really a right or a wrong, it’s about being emphatic. Butoh is all about presence. To many it sounds like a contradiction in terms, reviving and breaking free from the inner self. But that’s exactly what it’s all about. It’s about contradictions, dichotomy and paradoxes.
White makeup from head to toe
Many Butoh performers wear the typical white make-up from head to toe. It’s the idea of erasing yourself. Another way of creating an empty body, creating a way of moving that that is paradoxically erasing yourself in an attempt to find the more emphatic, the more deep, the more core in you.
It is more about being than expression
Let your body move spontaneously to the energy of the impulses. The impulses of the image. You are not preconceiving the Butoh, you are not preconceiving the emotion – it is all about being spontaneously and empathic on stage. It is the presence on stage wich is so powerful. A Modern Dancer, for example, wants to dance the element of water. He starts thinking about how to move his body so that he can express water, maybe she* is making wavy or flowing movements that look like water. A Butoh performer, on the other hand, first creates the empty body, then the strong inner image of being water. He reacts spontaneously to the energy of the inner impulse.
Moving from a place of no attention
Not preconceiving the emotion, not preconceiving the energy, not preconceiving the choreography, it is all about being emphatic and spontaneous to the moment an becoming part of this space.
I don´ t dance in the space – I´ am the space.
Not being perfect
Embracing your body, embracing your imperfections, and dancing your imperfections.