Breaking new soil with butoh last week. I attended a one week workshop lead by Mako and Hikaro Inagawa at Tatwerk. It was an ambitious enterprise,
which worked in the end :)
Nine participants, singers, performers, a care giver and philologist, eagerly absorbed the japanese performance tools, and 4RUDE‘s approach. Trying hard to make faces like rotten cows, breaking branches, or repeating spider walk over and over. It gave us a good muscle hangover!
About two month ago I started taking butoh classes. Looking for a change in my body and different imagery to dance from. I am discovering this, but allready it’s a beautiful contrast to the airborne ballet. Not striving for the sky, but connecting with the soil, and giving topics around death for example a dancy form. Its also just fun, and maybe a return to expressionist dance.
The images we worked with are often short stories, so called Butoh-fu. A kind of vocabulary to generate creative mind states. From which than the physical expression comes. For example a room full of pollen, sneezing faces or a grave keeper calming a pack of barking dogs. Or a crayon, with a childish face, sort of asking what do I draw today?
All this to tell Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. (Only part I, part II is following in November.)
In Hikaru’s work, there is seldomly one to one illustration of the narrative. This I already liked in their last piece CELLuLOID. Having a nice level of abstraction, and despite slow motion, an ongoing, dense concentration all the way through.
So, often there is stillness on the body surface, but internally we crossed the desert without water..
