The Savage Shaman

Butoh deconstructs the human body through embodied absurdities – for example, the body is a plastic bag full of fish, the bag moves as the fish swim around. While Butoh is based on the body, it’s most authentic enactment transcends the body completely. My teachers – Yukio Waguri, Denise Fujiwara and Jerry Gardner would insist: anything less is NOT Butoh.

Yukio Waguri Sensei, image from https://otsukimi.net/koz/index-e#top

But how to empty the body in the first place? And how to cultivate the expreme expressiveness and sensitivity required to authentically “Butoh” (as a verb, rather than an adjective).

Over the course of the last 20 years, I have received and developed the “Butoh-Fu” or “Butoh based pedagogy” of Butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata that serves as a doorway, or many doorways to the Butoh experience, and eventual mastery.

While this exercise is not directly from Hijikata, I invite you to try it as a doorway into Butoh – to give you a whiff of a flavor of the enduring mystery of Butoh.

Place a cup on a table near you.

1. Reach for the cup, pick it up and hold it as if you were about to drink.

Place the cup back on the table.

2. Next, put a lot of intention into reaching for the cup: “intending to reach for the cup. I am now reaching for the cup. I lift my hand, my wrist, my elbow. I extend my arm toward the cup. I grasp the cup with my fingers. Now I am lifting the cup, now I am bringing the cup to my mouth…” Be as specific as possible, with clear intention before even the tiniest movement .

Place the cup back on the table.

3. Now the cup reaches for your hand. There is no intention or “thinking” about how to move. Here, you are not moving at all, the cup is reaching. Move without moving. This is the beginning of Butoh.

….but it is NOT Butoh, only a beginning.

When there is no cup, no hand, no movement – and yet movement, then maybe……