The video is HERE!!!
Hey Savages, this was such a fun class and it featured one of my favorite Butoh exercises: carry the rock. But WHY?!? you may be asking 😉
Rocks are dense, physical, visceral. They are undeniably of the earth, and in interacting with the rocks, you are challenging yourself to confront your own visceral density, and eventually your own weakness. In a classroom full of dancers, this final exercise would look like:
Each dancer picks a rock from the pile that is heavy enough to be challenging, but light enough to carry over their heads. The dancers must walk very slowly, conscious of the weight and how it presses you into the ground. The dancer must resist at all costs. We walk around the space slowly, everyone carrying rocks, for several minutes – at least 10 or more, depending on your strength. One dancer will be the first to give up, and this is how they signal the change to the group:
The dancer who is on the brink of giving up walks to the center of the room and slowly collapses to the floor, still holding the rock. When the rest of the dancers notice this, they slowly walk to the dancer who is collapsed on the floor and they bury her – gently – with their rocks. They can continue to walk around or sit and witness the dancer who is now buried.
Her authentic Butoh dance now emerges as she relates to the weight of many rocks pressing her body down. Her only task is to stand, as authentically as possible, and to explore the possibilities in relation to gravity, many rocks, her body, and the space around her. It is not a performance, per se, and yet it is witnessed.
When she finally comes to a full standing position with her hands above her head, she will slowly step outside of the center to signal her exploration/expression is complete, and the exercise continues. She is walking slowly through the space with her empty hands over her head, and the rest of the class again picks up their rocks and walks around the space carrying the rocks over their heads until another dancer succumbs to exhaustion, steps into the middle, collapses, gets buried, and is witnessed in the emerging.
This exercise is profound for all the things that we don’t speak: the rocks take on a meaning of their own. We develop a relationship with these rocks, as the physical embodiment of whatever it is that we are carrying that we refuse to put down, the rocks are our burden, whatever weighs us down, and we are challenged to dig deeper to discover our will to resist surrender and collapse.
Nothing accomplishes this quite like carrying a heavy rock over your head.
I would also like to share with you a bit of my own personal experience with this exercise, which I have done many, many times before with different sized rocks, different groups of dancers, and for various durations. I am sharing this not because I want to encourage you to be emotional, but to be aware that emotions do come up, particularly with this exercise. It is important to begin and to maintain the simplicity of mind, that you are doing a very simple task: just carry the rock, don’t drop the rock. Just carry the rock over your head and walk slowly. That is all. You must have the neutral demeanor of a martial artist for all Butoh exercises, because that means you are open to the most authentic expression arising in the moment, and you are unfiltered. The moment you try to make something of it it is false, it is contrived actually, and the body will always betray such contrivance.
That is when your dance ceases to be meaningful, and as one of my teachers has said, you might as well be masturbating on stage. Nobody cares, and nobody wants to see that. So this complete commitment to the task is what brings forth that authentic “Butoh-sei” or Butoh quality, and that is what makes Butoh so irresistibly fascinating. The audience becomes a voyeur to a secret ritual on full display – you want to turn away, but you can’t, you are compelled to watch. Then you know you have this quality that is the pinnacle of artistic mastery.
But it’s not so easy to achieve, right? So part of the “Butoh fu” or Butoh method is to intentionally put the dancer in dangerous or compromising situations: enacting fetishes, violence, cross-dressing, nudity, challenging taboos and engaging with the elemental dangers of snow, water, earth, fire, wind, mud…the dance emerges in the struggle, and the struggle is authentic when it’s not contrived. Don’t act like you’re doing anything – just do the task. This is also pretty basic acting theory, but it applies to Butoh in this context. Except we are not “pantomiming” an action. And we are not seeking to show or look like we are doing anything.
Again, the deeper the dancer is committed to the task and connected to the impulses that move the body in service of such a task, the deeper the audience is drawn in helplessly to witness the attempt and sometimes completion of that task. The completion often results in a sort of death, or death ritual, which leads to a sort of transformative catharsis AFTER which point the true dance will emerge.
Yes, the Butoh dancer must undergo all of that torture before their body is stripped of all contrivances in order to allow the body to be authentically moved by so many unseen forces. This is very difficult to achieve, actually. So what I am sharing in these Body Poetry workshops is a taste of the training that has inspired and transformed me for 22 years now, the path that for me has become on the level of an addicting religious experience that I crave, and that comes to me in visions. And I’m inviting you along for the journey.
See you for the next one…