Thread: Butoh

I just did a butoh all day workshop (6 hours !) and found it immensely useful for my dance. It was like stripping away everything, and just going with pure emotions / internal imagery, particularly useful for me was around getting more comfortable with 'dark' emotions and imagery. I was with artists of other genres, some of who are not physical artists - and it was interesting to see how everyone did the same workshop.

Any one else tried any and find it useful for their dance ?

No, I don't even know what butoh is!! But now I'm really curious...

This is from Wiki "Butoh (舞踏, butō?) is the collective name for a diverse range of techniques and motivations for dance inspired by the Ankoku-Butoh movement. It typically involves playful and grotesque imagery often performed in white-body makeup but there is no set style. " - It's kind of difficult to explain Lauren, I saw it at the Edinburgh festival - a group called Derevo and really enjoyed it.

There's a bunch of YouTube clips if you just search for "Butoh". This guy is amazing!:

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ms7MGs2Nh8]YouTube - Butoh Dance Performance in Japan[/ame]

It looks very creepy and goth in a very cool (IMO) way. It reminded me of the imagery used by Marilyn Manson, Tool and Nine Inch Nails, so I wouldn't be surprised if they were Butoh-inspired.

Butoh is an avant-garde Japanese movement form. I would not call it dance exactly. I took about a year of butoh classes a long time ago when I was a university student in Berkeley. It was very intense! I am not sure how it affected my belly dance (I was working as a restaurant and party dancer at the time), except that it allowed me to imagine my body in ways I never had before. I also realized how much I/you/one could express with their face. The ugly and the beautiful. And both together sometimes.

To be honest I never quite understood what I was doing in class each week, but I kept going back for a while. I knew there was something there, just not always what it was or what it meant for me. The classes (at least the ones I attended) were only a small part of what we were supposed to do if we wanted to truly understand butoh, and I did not have enough to give. Ultimately I stopped, but still really enjoy seeing butoh performances.

(These were my teachers. They are totally wild and amazing and inspiring.)

Originally Posted by laura 2

There's a bunch of YouTube clips if you just search for "Butoh". This guy is amazing!:

Great clip. Thanks for posting!

I've loved butoh since forever. It's so primal and moving.

There's another clip I wanted to post which was of a butoh processions in a forest, it's really powerful, I think it must have been done in Japan.

I've long been fascinated by butoh and would love to study it. I don't see it necessarily as going along with BD, but it would be another way of exploring one's body and relation to space.

Wow. I would love to take a workshop in butoh. I saw a fantastic performance of it here in DC a few months ago.

OMG, that is soooo creepy!

(and neat)!

Wow, that's amazing. That's exactly the type of movement I've been wanting to explore without knowing it was a dance style. I've been Samara from The Ring two Hallowe'ens running just so I could play around with her unnatural movement; it makes me wonder if Butoh was part of the inspiration for the portrayals of ghosts, like Samara, in modern Japanese horror films.

I would love, love to learn this! My chances of finding a Butoh instructor in Connecticut, however, seem slim. :-(

Wow! That was very interesting! :thumbs_up: