This week began with a lecture on Butoh founders Hijikata, Kazuo Ohno and the influences of Mary Wigman, Ausdrunkdanz and World War II. On Tuesday, we took a journey through the eye balls all over the surface of our bodies until we mated and decayed and blew away.
On Thursday, Joan Laage taught a fantastic master class that I cannot begin to describe.
What will you harvest from this week on Butoh? How do you think Butoh fits into this course of Moving from Within? In what ways does Butoh connect to some of the other topics discussed in this course?
The lessons in Butoh this week were interesting. Before, I thought Butoh was a little scary. I better understand why the white paint and the eerie feel is an important aspect of this dance style. I really enjoyed both the classes on Butoh. The eye image was really interesting at first and it was interesting trying to let that image enter my body. I really enjoyed Joan’s class. It was definitely different from what I expected. I really liked some of the music and dragon image was cool as well. I really enjoyed the appearing and disappearing of a image at the end of class. I felt that really embodied what Butoh was about. As in the Body Concrete it said the founder of Butoh was interested “in letting movement emerge from the body, and one of the principal characteristics of his work was an emphasis on the material nature of the body as an object… [he] didn’t want to speak through the body or merely use it as an instrument which displayed technique… they wanted ‘to let the body speak for itself, to disclose the truth, to reveal itself in all its authenticity and depth, rejecting the superficiality of everyday life.’ The body was not merely an instrument or tool with which one espressed an idea, the body was the idea” (41). I felt like that really described what we were trying to do in the appearing and disappearing phase- trying to create an image but solely through the body and its voice rather than the body as technique to display this image. I felt like Butoh was a part of moving from within because it is another dance style that goes internally to find the body’s voice and then the body portrays that voice without any ego. Like authentic movement went internally to find the natural movement of the body so does Butoh- but Butoh lets the body speak through all its struggles.
ReplyDeleteJuhi
I begin the mornings crawling out of bed to learn about and listen to Butoh teachings. I am sick both mornings this week, and go to class attempting my best to practice this. I am encouraged especially because I feel myself gathering strength throughout the class periods. Both mornings I am able to drop into a deeper and expanded consciousness. On Tuesday we learn about the history of Butoh. Butoh is an expression of energy and freedom, not of symbolism or meaning. These two classes were ways for me to explore more clearly what I was experiencing and get out of my head. Butoh was described as a spirit merging with images, and that it is this relationship that gives movement to the body. This interaction between images and movement creates a pathway for a peace. When I was practicing Butoh on these mornings, I felt myself traveling, going to different spaces, within the realm of my imagination; this process lead to new possibilities. I found resonance between this experience and what is described by Joan on page 66 on The Body Concrete, as "consciousness and the multi-layered self." I don't quite understand everything in the text in a way that I can directly relate this to my own experiences and theories, but I am excited to have this as a reference for the future and my work and healing! In the same way that Nanako found Tatsumi's words were unclear, crazy, and self-mystifying and only through learning and practicing butoh did they become "real and comprehensible" I imagine that Laage's will do the same (15). We learned also that white paint is used as an aspect of cleansing the body, in ritual, and acts as an eraser of identity for the audience and performer. The costumes/dress Butoh dancers wear are also used as a way of erasing cultural information. Although, I also reflect now on the Butoh work that I have seen, and I think that costumes are used as a tool of performativity in many cases. For example, in the piece La Argentina, Kazuo Ohno wears a very specific outfit, using that as a way to evoke specific and collective memories on the part of the audience, and most likely, himself. The body in butoh acts, as Joan Laage said, like a corpse on a string. The head is drawn with the chin back, and this erases the ego and releases the psyche. The face holds receding eyes, pulling vision inward and recieving light. The hara is the center of emotion and life energy and the butoh pracitce draws from here the source of its work. Butoh is a powerful tool of connection. We warmed up on Tuesday moving across the floor to music, and we went into many levels and directions. We walked, rubbed hands, and placed them over our eyes to dissolve and grow new eyes. We practiced being cacoons, moving between our eyes, tongues, limbs, and all this in the foci of regeneration. On Thursday, we appeared and disappeared, emptied and filled. We used these images to create energies within the dance. We also explored switching perspectives in a variety of ways. We imagined we were several different animals. We imagined that our front was our back, that our feet were our hands, that our body is their body, that their hands are my hands, that their touch on my back is my own touch on my own back. All this was used as a way to undo our habits of particular ways of percieving the world and our bodies. I found these really useful and stimulating exercises. I noticed my mind relaxing, yielding in an understanding that it didn't have to know, at least for now, what to expect and how the feeling should be. I was trying something new, and it was a beautiful way to experience the world. In The Body Concrete, Joan Laage elaborates on Hijikata's movement, saying that it was "marked by an anti-dance spirit supporting spontaneous movement" (42). This description resonates with the Butoh experiences I have had.
ReplyDeleteButoh! This week was really intense. I thought it was really interesting though. It made me dance in a new way that I've never danced before. There were many moments in our eye dance when I was just thinking, "What on earth am I doing?" The tongues stretching across the floor, growing into a new creature and trying to find a mate, etc. But after just letting go and fully being present, I think that I actually let go and just let things be. It was definately intense because buthoh "lets the body speak for itself, to disclose truth, to reveal itself in all its authenticity and depth, rejecting superficiality of everyday life." (pg 41). It was definately raw. There is just this new level of intensity that is hard to describe with butoh. It's not about looking pretty or right but just about being present. I think it is cool how we use different kind of imagery to inspire our dance.
ReplyDeleteWith Joan's class, I think at one point I connected Butoh with our class of "Moving from within." It was when we were doing our stepping on glass section where we slowly transitioned into our pose near the end of class. I just remember that as I got closer and closer to my pose, my face and my body felt more alive and the sensations were throbbing. It reminded me of our body scan, how we would focus on each body part and feeling it being alive. I definately felt my that my body was alive as I got closer to my pose.
What I thought was really most fun of the week though, would be when we were all standing in a circle on Joan's class and we were breathing and making breath go faster and faster. There was this rush of adrenaline during this and I felt even more alive even though we were just breathing. Definate cool.
cougar
Butoh this week has showed me how powerful internal sensations/images can be. I can apply the idea of internal sensations/images to dancing in the future. Internal mechanisms really change the quality of movement.
ReplyDeleteTuesdays class was rather awesome. I loved allowing those images to take over. It amazed me how tiring it was to feel the pain and pleasure along with the pushing and pulling. Crazy. I also enjoyed being my own creature how eventually went back into the earth. I was very comsumed my the sensations,images when it was time to slowly die. one word: fabulous!
Thursdays class was interesting. it was hard to fully feel the hanging corpse sensation while attempting to do the broken glass activity. Overall, it was a great experience!
Butoh fits into this course, because it’s a non-traditional way of dancing. Though the images/sensations are planned out, the external movement is created organically. This is similar to authentic movement, because the external movement is created organically. It’s similar to contact improvisation in a sense because they both involve listening to the body and allowing things to flow/happen, things are planned out.
It was a really great experience having a class of mainly talk of Butoh with a history and some movement, followed up by a workshop of pure exploration of this form physically.
ReplyDeleteThe two most memorable experiences which I will harvest from this week of Butoh both occurred at the end of each class sesssion. The idea of becoming a river was one of the most evocative images for me. When I was allowed to let things flow through me, as if I was a flowing river with beautiful music and happy memories, my body could not resist flowing and moving freely. My body wanted to be the river, become the river, and it is this idea, like Joan says in “The Body Concrete/Ethereal” that our body is a “container of images.”
The second experience that I will harvest the most from in Joan’s class was the transmission of the image of broken glass in our mouths to the broken glass becoming our bodies. Broken glass was such a strong image that after only a few seconds, my body wanted the exersize to be over because there was a really discomfort and truth to have and experiencing glass around my gums, tongue, teeth and other regions of my mouth. As we started to become the broken glass, I felt this awkwardness creeping through all of my limbs and torso, even out to my hands. I was surprised at how much I could hold the tension and discomfort of this image in my body. Then, after a few times of moving in and out of the image, I felt a really strong flow from being the glass to transforming out of it.
These were some of the stronger experiences I had in class, and I have enjoyed the help they gave me in my own Butoh project.
I have to say that I genuinely enjoyed this week. I have previously been exposed to butoh and was not very excited about learning more about it in this class. After reading our of the course pack and having the master class with Joan, however, my perception of butoh has changed and I think it is more beautiful than I had previously thought. When I have seen butoh being performed, I have often thought it was very weird to see performers in such foreign outfits and moving in such an odd way as I have never seen before. As is mentioned in The Body Ethereal chapter, “the body is at once a spiritual and corporeal body, an internal and external, invisible and visible, living and dead body” (page 62). It was very interesting to experience this throughout my exploration of butoh. I was able to get a better sense of what the motive is behind the art and why people would enjoy doing it. During the master class, we were supposed to have the sensation that we were focused internally, but in butoh, performers rarely close their eyes. While this was a very interesting sensation, it also helped me to understand the reasoning behind the facial expression of butoh performers.
ReplyDeleteI also enjoyed playing with different facial expressions during Joan’s master class. In watching past butoh performances, I have thought the facial expressions used were very odd and had a difficult time understanding how they related to the performance and the overall message of the piece. As Joan illustrates, “facial expressions range from passive to explosive” and “the face becomes the mask yet is in itself changeable in expression” (pages 45-46). It was very interesting to think about the way that facial expression help to enhance a butoh performance.
This study of butoh helped to bring me out of my comfort zone and physically participate in a practice I had only seen performed. I really was able to feel how much raw emotion could be exuded during the exercises we completed and how it can be a very therapeutic experience for performers. In that way, butoh really helped to not only move my body from within, but also help let out some intense feelings that I had emotionally.
“ The body was not merely an instrument or tool with which one expressed an idea, the body was the idea” (The Body Concrete, 41). The exercise on Tuesday completely brought me into a sense of my body as an idea. Especially when we moved into the reformation of our bodies out of a cocoon I was aware that I was no longer trying to portray a different body form but that my body had taken over the exercise and was embodying the different form. “'The intensity of what we find often contorts us into barley recognizable forms'” (The Body Concrete, 52). As I burst from the cocoon, my body felt unlike my own and moved in a way that was new. I felt my muscles contracting in non-habitual ways. “Human beings exist in a web of intersecting and inseparable relationships within each lifespan and throughout time” (The Body Ethereal, 60). From the reading, this idea related to the ability of a butoh body to exhibit each of these relationships, but I related this phrase with our frantic search for a mate. During this part of the exploration we were exhibiting this web by trying to connect with another being. I searched disparagingly and almost without hope of being able to find this connection and yet I had a sense that it was extremely necessary to make this connection; I think this is related to the fact that the story of a human lifetime is told through the connections that are made. There is always the fear that connections cannot be made, but the drive of trying to achieve them is ever present. As we grew tired, aged and dying I felt completely at peace and relieved not to have the anxiety that came with trying to forge these connections, and yet I also felt that I was more clear on the purpose of that struggle in this state than I had been when we were all frantically rushing around. Laying on the ground, in death as I focused only on the breath that I still had I connected with the phrase “...life is within death and death is within life” (The Body Ethereal, 62). As our bodies decayed and turned to dust I felt my body dissolve, “...the outline of the body becomes ambiguous, as if disappearing in a fog” (The Body Ethereal, 62), and was replaced only with the image that Louis was giving of going out and out into space and toward a white river emanating with light. This was a beautiful image and as the tiny speck that was left of my form became one with the river, I was so satisfied with the feeling of being enveloped by the river. “For Hijikata the body is a metaphor for words and words are a metaphor for the body” (The Words of Butoh, 16). If I had two words for the experience from Tuesday and that bodily journey, they would be “perfect moment.”
ReplyDeleteApologies for my long windedness...
ReplyDeleteFor Joan Laage's masters class the words would be “crazy awesome.” There was so much exploration in this session it is hard to concisely explicate. “Like an unselfconscious young child without purpose, an artist becomes egoless” (The Body Ethereal, 72). I really felt in my time in the class on Thursday that I was able to detach from an ego and attach instead to an image. Particularly when we were dragons, I was completely into the image and wondered why we didn't act like dragons more often. “Like all movements in Butoh, gestures are born out of a uninhibited use of the creator's experience and imagination, and they are not necessarily meant to be symbolic although they may appear to be.” (The Body Concrete, 54). I thought it was important, when embodying the dragon or broken glass, that it not be thought of as symbolizing a dragon or broken glass but of being those things. Before this master class, I didn't really understand the different, but once my body was put to work I began to understand the difference between being a dragon and symbolizing a dragon. The exercise when we were monkey's was extremely helpful for me to experience the integration of hara. “Hara is the center of life and death, and also the center of gravity within the body” (The Body Concrete, 49). Hanging from the tail I was able to feel this center of energy from which the other movements in butoh emanate.
“It is the hara that is perceived as the substance or essential center of existence, of becoming and of transforming-the center where the many become the one, chaos becomes order, the particular become universal, and the death or stillness become life or motion...The movement in Butoh, stationary or locomotor, is initiated within this area of centralization located in the lower torso. The body is this able to maintain a sense of suspension leaving the impression that there is little need to struggle against the pull of gravity” (The Body Concrete, 50).
When we took the energy from the center of the earth and sequenced it out, my body was extremely enervated. I was buzzing inside and out. Moving from this energy was one of my favorite parts of the class. Also, the final exercise of sequencing into and out of the images of broken glass really helped me get into touch with the intricacies and effort that goes into the creation of the body as image.
-Allexa Laycock
Butoh is more of a performance piece compared to some of the other dance/movements we have explored this quarter, but it comes from a similar imagery and an internal feeling being reflected in movement. In this sense, I felt it fit in perfectly with the rest of the quarter. I was especially interested in the classes since I am doing a Butoh piece for my final project. I had attended one of the Saturday workshops, but was still not sure what to expect of the classes. The Tuesday class was interesting…trying to embody a strange creature made up of eyes with long lashing tongues was strange. I especially liked the part where we were born from a cocoon, had our mating dance and died. It was interesting to explore all the imagery especially in connection to others. I am afraid my creature died a lonely death. The river of light at the end was invigorating and I only wish that class could have lasted longer! Thursday’s class taught by Joan Laage was quite amazing. From the hissing dragons to the monkeys hanging from trees. Some of the crouched bent leg movements was really hard for me to do. I think the two things however that I took out of the class were the animated corpse and the dehumanizing ones movement. The animated corpse connected the passage in the reading (Embodying the Spirit) where it said ““...life is within death and death is within life”, that corpse to me is more than just the strange movements or death, but a connection to the whole life cycle.
ReplyDeleteThe appearing disappearing movement at the end was also good as I realize I move rather to quickly at times and it helped to really slowly break down the movement. To be honest this weeks classes are especially hard for me to articulate about, perhaps my two words at the end sum it up for me, they were fish and sunlight. Fish because I felt out of my element, like a fish out of water, also fish to me represent the surreal and dreamscapes, which I feel is something that Butoh explores with all the imagery. Sunlight because I have been noticing such a warmth and glow in our classes, even when exploring darker subjects such as death. I feel very honored to have gotten to have taken the class on Thursday by Joan, especially after watching her dance Friday. I hope my piece will in someway remain true to this rather interesting dance form.
Butoh. Butoh. Butoh. When I say the name of this dance outloud, speaking slowly, I feel sensations in my body. The sensation makes mewant to drop into myself; to slowly decompose like a flower after its peak. Aflower like all plants return to the Earth, slowly sensitive to temperature,sunlight, moisture and other cultural factors, from life to death; dropping itsseeds, offering new life to the soil from which its life stemmed.
ReplyDeleteFrom our history lesson on Butoh on Tuesday I was energizedand intrigued by the radical nature of this dance form. The way that it emergedand developed in Germany, Japan and the United States, is interesting. Theclips of Butoh dancers that we watched filled me with both fear and curiosity,I wondered what images were used to facilitate the ghoulish yet beautiful movementsI was witnessing? I was struck by the physique of the dancers, I witnessedstrength, and grace; the emotions flooding the physical body were palpable. Therewere stories of what it is to be human, coming through the movements of thesedancers. “Butoh as been called the dance of raw emotion,” (Lange, 49) This rawemotion is said to stem from the center of emotion, the center of existence,the hara, the place of “becoming and of transforming – the center where themany become one, the chaos becomes order, the particular becomes universal, anddeath or stillness become life or motion,” (Lange, 50). Transformation,possibility, opportunity, the essence of what is humanly possible is alive inButoh. In practice, eyeballs grew all over my body, inviting me to perceive andengage with space from multiple vantage points, tails pulling and pushing me inevery direction. I was a cocoon, experiencing a metamorphosis into a new way ofbeing, a new and different being….My emergence from the cocoon was brilliant, Islowly cracked my shell and as a baby bird entered the world, gingerly at firstand later spreading my wings, meeting other creatures that fit, finding a fit,or two or three was beautiful and perfect in every way…and then death, ceasingto be, yet relishing in the brilliance of birth, of life and then the stillnessthat follows life. Powerful imagery guided a transformative, raw experience.
Thursday I experienced a spectrum of sensations, fast, slow,heat, cold, individual, collective, familiar, and unknown. I remember chewingon broken glass, my mouth watering profusely, feeling it in my eyes, ears,head, cheeks, lips, nose and down my spine. This image penetrates myconsciousness as I chew and chew, slowly my whole body feels the glass, my bodytells the story of the broken glass, my body is the broken glass.
From Butoh I have my appreciation for stillness heightens.We can learn so much from being still, being quite, by moving ever so slowing.By pausing, we can ground in an experience; look into ourselves, to find truth,meaning and the answers we seek. In TheBody Ethereal, “Nakamura explains that for the Japanese people, static thingsare very important, that something has to be dead in order to be understood.Hijikata often said that the best body for a Butoh dance is a corpse, a bodythat asks for nothing and expresses nothing” (Lange, 59). Can the practice ofButoh help us to arrive at understandings found only in death?
I got to watch Joan Lange perform on Friday evening in Red Square, the sun low in the sky lit up the brickswhere she moved. She moved ever so slowly, complete yet effortless control overher body, exhibiting fierce strength in her limbs and hara; face rich withemotion. Her majesty overwhelms me as I witness a master becoming, and becomingand becoming….a story comes alive through the body. This is the most importantstory to tell, the story of humanity, of life and of death, of everything andof nothing.
-Lindsey
Butoh.... what an experience I have never encountered before. The art of decay, and showing movements with bodies painted white. Movements express usually extreme emotions from within the self. Tuesday was my first taste of Butoh. I enjoyed this class because we incorporated Skinner technique as in the feeling of puppet strings which was one of my favorite visuals to work with in the Skinner technique. I began to feel the intensity of focus as we walked across the floor and around the room as we did individual dances in the space as we were given thoughts to pictures to portray.
ReplyDeleteThursday's class with Joan Laage was an interesting experience for me. I ate a large breakfast, and for some reason dancing Butoh early in the morning and jumping into movements as we rushed through material upset my stomach. But I continued to move through class so I could experience every aspect of the two hour Butoh session. In the warm-ups I enjoyed standing in a circle and working with facials and voice along with movement. I found that even if the arm movements were outward toward someone else across the circle, I still had an internal focus in the intensity of I was portraying with my expression and the dynamics of my voice.
Moments of silence resinated through my body. I noticed that I needed these moments of silence to remember why I was doing Butoh and trying to relate the expressions and exercises to real life. Silence is a time for gathering yourself, as well as a time for some self reflection. As Vicki Sanders said in The Body Concrete, A Butoh performance may be said to exist in mu no basho, a place of nothingness, where mushin (no-mind) prevails.(p. 69)" In a way one is trying to get be somewhat unconscious. You are aware of your surroundings and the internal emotions you feel, but one has to find a way to create a canvas from a clean slate and not focus on the physical body or how it appears though Butoh movement.
In partners, my favorite exercise was when we made expressions of how we would express glass with our faces and gestures as we sat across from each other on the floor. Then we took two poses from the dance and assended and desended into these poses by ourselves as we walked forward through space. I noticed how many different varieties of movers and experiences that were being expressed across the room in between my movements. I think of Butoh as authentic movement because of these varieties of experiences and internal encounters that exist among every dancer. Even if parts of a Butoh dance is set, still expressions and movements within the set score change and vary in every performance.
Katie Boulanger
Butoh
ReplyDeleteA glorious week of Butoh indeed! I love it! I love that it challenges me to get inside of myself and dig around inside my muddy viscera and explore whatever crude, beautiful or viciousness boils forth. I love that it uses the power of imagery as I have always been a very image-oriented person. I often think in images and recall memories based on images. I also dream intensively almost every night and my dreams can be extremely vivid and colorful. All the work that we did with Butoh somehow feels connected to my dreaming state. When I am dreaming I often find myself in locations that I know quite well. I know exactly where the location is in my dream, but the image in my dream’s eye is often different than the physical location. Connecting Butoh and my dreaming makes me think about how using images of locations could play out into movements or emotional states connected with a location and how all of this might be able to translate into performance. Often, my dreams take me to places that I recognize and when I’m there I feel very strongly certain emotions. These associations of emotion to a location in my dreams translate very well for me into Butoh where an image whether a location or an object etc. is brought into my body and where I am given the task of filling this image in.
Being an academic I often try to come up with quick explanations of different forms of dance that I do to provide, those that are unfamiliar with the form, a simple understanding. I have been having a very hard time coming up with an understanding of butoh for myself and found an amazing quote in the reading: “In butoh the theme is the body and the body is the idea” (Hitoshi Kamo). This quote explains a lot in very little and, for me, provides a platform and context for butoh. The quote also makes me very curious about the whole philosophy behind butoh and makes me want to ask a lot of questions. Not all of my questions have a manifestation yet and some have already been answered through movement and through work done in class and in workshop time that I have spent. What does it mean to have a theme be “the body?” Does it mean that everything in butoh can be simplified and boiled back down to an essence that is “the body?” I don’t think that this can be boiled down to only body because it’s our minds in butoh that are really the initiators. Our minds create an image and our bodies fill the image making it something more. Exercises like the head becoming one eyeball really helped to open my body into different experiences of sensing with my body. It’s easy to become visually reliant as we are daily. The practice of giving every surface of our body eyes drew me into a feeling of visual perception that I hadn’t ever felt before. It was a strange feeling that is hard to describe. Maybe the closest that I can come in writing right now is that it felt like I was completely overwhelmed in visual information. I couldn’t process all the eyeballs wanting to send me information. It was an internal sensory overload, but while I was still receiving visual input and trying to absorb it softly.
There's just simply too much to write on this and I am having such a great time exploring Butoh and how it can connect into my life and dancing.
Morgan