| Butoh Workshop by Tatsumi Hijikata Memorial Butoh Troups 13/7/2003 1st half with Taketeru Kudoh <The Will> ---------------------------------------- Our bodies are dead. Kudoh demonstrated to us that muscles alone do not make a body come alive. The will within is the force that pulls the inanimate pounds of flesh up like the string of the marionette. First, he collapsed onto the ground lifeless. Then the limpid arm moved a little as if it would never pull away from gravity. His body began to shake violently as the will in him battled to push his infantile legs up. This is how you get up in 5 minutes. To us, hovering halfway with legs buckling for a minute was nothing less than pain. Hence the term painfully slow. We are always moving yet we never notice every tiny transition from the electric signal through the nervous system to the first twitch of the muscles. We move yet we never live that moment. It is always moving to a place by a certain time, chasing a goal, rushing to reach the end. Time in Butoh is always NOW. 2nd half with Akiko Motofuji <A Dream of the Fetus> ---------------------------------------------------- Who are you? I mean, what's really behind those horn-rimmed glasses and chic outfit you're wearing? Even if you take them off leaving nothing but your skin behind, what's behind that nakedness? Who are you before you come out of your mother's womb; before you reincarnate into this human form? Do you still have any memories left from those reincarnations--memories of the time being a leaf, a micro-organism, a whale or a short-lived snowflake swirling down. These existences last only the short state of consciousness in between the transitions; a drop in time. How else do you live? If not for that moment before you metamorphorsize into another entity. The body is a sea of sadness. As we lay on the floor after the sweat letting workout, Motofuji urged us to go deeper into our hidden consciousness which contained memories of our past lives and howl out aeons of pain. My tears rolled into my sweat as I reached out my hands to the sky. The body is slowly being killed; this cultured body we adorn is subverted. Tear away those garments that deny your primate roots for nudity is but a modern concept. Collective consciousness: the arena of Butoh aesthetic ------------------------------------------------------ We were divided into groups to watch each one explore different transformation. How would you feel as a bird? We flap our hands but are birds conscious of their wing movements that we humans presume? The bird experiences the wind under its wings, it glides, it is pushed up by the wind, it experiences an unbearable lightness of being. As I watched the other groups transform into bees and birds or melt into liquid through their own interpretation, it became a dance; a collective movement that flow like mercury into a whole. It is beautiful. Ugly Beautiful -------------- You can call it Dadaist or absurdist, because the avant gardist will do anything but follow the footsteps of accepted aesthetics. And Butoh is anything but graceful. "Its carthartic field is composed of gestural images rising to form out of the subconscious in whatever sublime or awkward they take". (Fraleigh, 1999) ___________________________________________________________________ Fraleigh, S. (1999). Dancing into darkness: Butoh, Zen and Japan. Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press. |