Butoh Dictionary

A Subbody term simply meaning the mundane, everyday world and body when it is not in the butoh world or body.

A term coined by Turkish butoh artist Özerk Sonat Pamir as part of his Breath Body method representing any point in the body which has lost awareness or feeling.

In butoh, we are expected to connect with every point in the body. Any point that has lost awareness is to be rehabilitated via breath.

A Shadowbody concept that borrows from contact improvisation. Essentially, dead contact is contact improvisation executed in a a dead or weakened body fashion.

One of the 8 butoh spices in Shadowbody.

Associated with surrender, stillness, and rest.

A term used by some butoh practitioners when butoh and contact improvisation are mixed together.

In the context of Shadowbody, this is when something appearing trivial, fake, playful, or superficial is placed in the category of profound.

Also called fraudthenticity or fauxthenticity.

The concept is inspired by Tatsumi Hijikata's writing Ailing Dancer where at the beginning of the writing he states, “Because of monotonic and anxious things storming the body, I might faintly be aiming at an opportunity to fabricate fake things within by wearing a haze to the body.”

According to Rhizome Lee’s in-class commentary, “fabricating fake things” was a reversal of the “authenticity” or “real” goal of creation. To Lee, this was one of Hijikata’s trickster-like moments of putting the supposed goal of theatre on its head.

Term related to deterritorialization and recontextualization where the ordinary function or meaning of something is made unfamiliar or changed to something else.

This is at the very basis of Viktor Shkovsky’s view of art. Shkovsky notes, “The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.”

In butoh a good rule of thumb to know that any object is not what it appears to be.

Shadowbody terminology of a portmanteau play on words between "definite" and "enigmatic" making definigmatic.

For butoh, it emphasizes the importance of not only having focus but also spontaneity.

A Subbody term meaning the ability to go into minute detail and is related to fine motor skill. The butoh dancer tries to have somatic awareness of every single part of the body.

A concept from Deleuze and Guattari describing the process by which established structures, codes, or territories are disrupted, allowing movement, thought, or desire to escape fixed boundaries. In artistic practice, deterritorialization opens space for novel forms, fluid identities, and unexpected connections.

Concept parallels that of recontextualization.

Example use in Shadowbody: the arm is deterrirtorialized when it enters into a becoming-eel.

The difficult is in not engaging pantomime but in Deleuzean concept of becoming-x, so a translation of intensities or "intensive differences" such as speeds or temperaments.

A devotional death butoh term where all moments of dying in the dance are automatically viewed as a surrender to God.

In Shadowbody, the disabled body is one of the human character tropes or butoh in real life that either inspires or resembles butoh.

This is a popular exercise engaged in physical theatre and contemporary dance which is executed as followed in the space:

If one person stops, everyone stops, and when one person resumes moving, everybody resumes moving. A variation of this exercise which was shown by Imre van den Bosch, a site-specific theatre director and educator, is for the entire group to stop at the same time.

In Shadowbody, a tongue exercise where one lets the tongue dangle out long like that of a dog. From here one can move the head so that the tongue really dangles.

In Shadowbody, not to be mistaken by glass ball eye, this is the eyes that goes from either completely open or completely shut as some dolls do.

Shadowbody term related to the multiplicity body where the body is composed of endless tiny dots that all have resonance patters and move. Being able to collapse the body into tiny movement is vital to find various detail dance.

In Shadowbody, this is a tongue exercise where there is a dragon inside the mouth. This imagery is also used in qi-gong.

In Shadowbody, this is the concept where a body part takes an extreme amount of time to do one function, such as the Kazuo Ohno exercise of taking several minutes to simply open the hand.

Another term for Subbody. inspired by Aboriginal dreamtime, describing how the subconscious rises into the dancing body, merging dreaming and waking states into movement.

In Shadowbody, the drunk body is one of the human character tropes or butoh in real life that either inspires or resembles butoh.