Butoh Dancing (舞踏): Discovering Emptiness, Embodiment & Environment in an Archeology of Body

Experiencing & Communicating The Body

Atsushi Takenouchi

Body Consciousness

At its root an extraordinarily simple dance, Butoh radically challenges the notion of the body as merely a vessel for narrative. Butoh embraces the human body as no longer the means and end of movement and expression, but rather as the very substance being expressed. The stories that can be dreamt around the shapes created by Butoh dancers most often involve a sudden representation of the awareness of the body as reality.

“In Butoh, the body is not a tool for expressing a story; the body is a story,” says Tetsuro Fukuhara, a Tokyo-based Butoh dancer and choreographer who studied under one of the founders of the Butoh movement, Akira Kasai. This perception may often be revealed in the dramatic shape of the dancer playing with the gradient between limb and outer environment, or as a tale of confrontation with the struggles of the body as perimeter of a world.

With physicality as protagonist, the composition of Butoh dance becomes malleable as clay; its unrepeatable evolution is uttered in every gesture and vacuum. The challenge is to rediscover the body’s intrinsic ability to move within space in its most unanointed and desocialized form – a return to uninhibited innocence. This requires a deep surrender to thoughtlessness and a reception to the spontaneous response of one’s own body.

Moreso than with any actual movement or aesthetic, it is this body consciousness that forms the core of Butoh. It is what makes Butoh so necessary in hyper-modern environments that capitalize on the imposed ignorance and objectification of our bodies. The process of remembering the sensuality of body, transcending body shame, and submitting to purposelessness in bodily expression is the foundation from which dancers can begin to understand and communicate Butoh. Once such space is created within, a dancer can feel the compassion necessary to respect the body, and Butoh can begin to be expressed through gesture.

Embodiment & Stillness

Gesture & Movement

Maureen Freehill © Dmitry Artamonov

Butoh in motion is a communion between inspiration and limb, where bones rise and sink to no musical rhythms, except those of a moment’s most immediate essence. But spontaneous reaction alone is not always enough to communicate the thoughts of a Butoh dancer. Sometimes exercises themselves take on a theatrical quality to challenge dancers in their explorations of embodiment. The Butoh dancer learns to express the whole world by fully living the reality of whatever object, element or living being they choose. They become possessed. As a result, depending on the dancer’s spontaneous experience or vision, Butoh will exist in a delicate balance between the complete abandonment of role and a willful impression of objects.

Equally as powerful as articulated gesture within Butoh, however, is the absence of movement or a silence of being. Such an expression is absent in many other forms of dance. This kind of suspended anti-gesture uses stillness to speak louder than any human choreography. Once in motion, the body’s pace is channeled through the internal rhythms of rushing blood and breath, or by experimenting with unsynchronized layers of music and movement.

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