Butoh Dictionary

Created by Mabel Elsworth Todd (1880–1956) as a somatic technique using mental imagery to improve posture, alignment, and movement efficiency. By visualizing anatomical and kinetic patterns, it retrains the nervous system, facilitating more effortless and expressive movement.

In terms of butoh, ideokinesis shows just how powerful the perfect image can be in movement.

The second of the three-part process of Akaji Maro's Maro Method which the body is understood as a mold or cast shaped by lived experience, tension, and external pressures. The dancer embodies form not as a personal invention but as something poured into and solidified within the body.

The closeness in reaction time to stimulus, inside or out. The outcome becomes presence.

A Shadowbody term and exercise in cultivating intensity in performance.

A participant engages in a familiar strenuous or passionate activity whether physical, emotional, and/or psychological. Then the participant suddenly stops and shifts to another qualia.

Peter Brook once said, “Imagine one hundred blind people listening to you. The fact that you swing on trapeze, is irrelevant. But the impulse which takes you to the trapeze should be in what you say.”

In other words, it’s granted that we are intense or real about something in our lives. We can take that underlying intensity and transpose it onto something else.