Butoh is an avant-garde movement form first performed by Japanese artists Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno in 1959. Originally conceived as an iconoclastic rejection of contemporary western dance technique, butoh aims to strip away socially acceptable movements and gestures, and encourages students to find and embrace hidden movements that lie buried beneath years of conditioned behavior. In this weekly, ongoing class we focus on butoh movement methodology, the aim of which is to uncover ‘the natural body.’ Each class begins with a somatics-based warm-up, partnering work to explore skeletal, muscular, and fascial layers of movement and energy exchange, and vigorous floor work. The latter half of each class is spent developing fragile and vulnerable states in the body to explore the “materiality of being.” Image-based poetry is used as grounds for movement generation in brief witnessed improvisations at the end of each class. Dancers at all movement levels are welcome to participate.
