Get out of your head and into your body. The “Flow” workshop series highlights improvisational dance practices including Gaga, Butoh, Contemplative Dance, and more which encourage us to find ourselves in our own bodies while sharing space in community.

This Month:BUTOH

Butoh is a postmodern approach to movement that originated primarily in the work of Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno in Japan in the 1950s. No previous dance experience is necessary. Anyone interested in exploring their bodies through movement improvisation are welcome—beginners and advanced practitioners alike. Synthesized in the aftermath of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, butoh is now practiced around the globe and has developed through many strategies for generating movement. My approach to butoh cultivates shifting meditative experiences of the body as a mode of becoming. Through a series of layered improvisations, we will explore various states of awareness, duration, and deterritorialization as we engage our bodies as a range of images and other forms of materiality. In this process, we surrender certainty of what a body means or what it might become; we experiment with the potential of the body in relation to others and task-based scores, opening to possibilities for how else we might experience ourselves. In this sense, butoh provides a context in which to investigate the relationship of the body to the world; to explore what can emerge out of states of complexity, crisis, or impossibility; and to practice staying open to what might not be known.