Butoh Dictionary

A term from Deleuze and Guattari encompassing a segment of experience where the place/set/setting is not separate from the self.

To the butoh dancer, the body and place are linked. This can be related to the concept of the transparent body.

From Deleuze & Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus: “Climate, wind, season, hour are not of another nature than the things, animals , or people that populate them, [but] follow them, sleep and awaken within them. This should be read without a pause: the-animal-stalks-at-five-o’clock. The becoming-evening, becoming-night of an animal, blood nuptials. Five o’clock is this animal! This animal is this place!"

This is the crossed eye, but then one eye straightens out. To attain this, first cross the eyes, and then one of the eye straightens out.

A Subbody term referencing building awareness and incorporating into the dance to the joints in our body that have very limited movement such as intermetacarpal joints and the intercarpal joints of the hand or the sternoclavicular joint.

A Subbody term that deterritorialized the skin as we usually think of it and the skin grows larger to encompass more of the space, and this hidden skin can connect to others and so we are able to feel them.

There is a type of high intensity work that butoh artists such as Diego Pinon and Coco Villarreal engage in. The pattern which can be called a ritual involves getting participants into a high stress physical and/or psychological and/or emotional state until the limits are reached or breached. The participant will have given a signal of having enough. At this point, a dance begins.

Such an extreme requires a very conscious facilitation for safety. The facilitator takes on a lot of responsibility and must be ready for anything. The facilitator should also stress that the participant has their own responsibility to know their limits. Coco supplements the ritual with sound, voice, and smudging. The high intensity will have been worked up to via prior exercises and warmups.

Example rituals:

A circle forms connected with rope and one participant throws the body onto the rope only to be slung back via the collective effort of those around the circle. This goes on until the participant is exhausted or has had enough and raises arms as to signal submission. If another intensity ritual is not added onto this, the improvisational dance will begin at the center of the circle.

One participant is followed by a crowd of people making fun of the participant with words and body language. This goes on until the participant has had enough and raises their arms. Then the dance begins.

One criticism of high intensity edgework is that the participant might not be able to surpass the state of antithesis which leads to synthesis. In other words, the ritual will have not found a resolution, and if this happens, the exercise could create new emotional and/or psychological issues or make prior ones worse. Caution is advised.

Japanese term for the ash walk which goes back to Tatsumi Hijikata. One walks as if they are a pillar of ash. Any sudden movement, and the ash dissipates.

A Jerzy Grotwosky (1933 - 1999) term regarding an actor who gives themselves totally in performance — stripping away masks, defenses, and ego — to reveal their innermost truth. It is not about representing a character, but about an offering of one’s own being in front of others like a sacrifice.

This is a Jerzy Grotowski term where the actor possesses the as Grotowski says in Towards a Poor Theatre, “the attitude of giving and receiving which springs from true love: in other words, self sacrifice.”

He further expresses, “One must give oneself totally, in one’s deepest intimacy with confidence, as when one gives oneself in love.”

In Shadowbody, the hover is a low level movement (though can also take place along a wall) with the focus being a constant hover one inch from the ground by as many parts of the body as possible.

This is a Shadowbody group exercise similar to crazy zipper, the participants get in a circle and put their hands in the center then grab hands at random. They then have to undo the knot without breaking hands.

Unlike the stacked body or chimera, the hybrid body does not have separately defined qualias but instead are merged together into a new qualia like an offspring or like yellow and blue making green. A little bouncy ball and a leech might turn into a fat homunculus that bounces all over the place with fat suckers all over it.