Butoh Dictionary

A Subbody term meaning resonance as a whole or in general to all the various modalities of our life in the world.

Similar to the term Brotherhood from Polish theatre director Jerzi Grotowski (1933 - 1999) expressing a poetic resonance linking humans, nature, senses, and cosmic elements.

A Shadowbody practice of snorting the life around you into one nostril to get let the high on life sensation move the body.

A Shadowbody term denoting strings that move the dancer in only one direction depending on where the string is. This is the typical way in which to view a string, as opposed to non-linear strings.

A Shadowbody term inspired by the term living mask. The living costume is when the body or part of the body implies a sort of costume, e.g. nudity obscured by the limbs. One could say the body here has taken on a new costume (using its own body).

The concept that in butoh, the face can take on a mask, but this mask is one's own face that can transform into the mask.

A Shadowbody term where the in breath and out breath are in a 1-to-1 correspondence to the space, forming a lung out of the space itself.

Example: Traveling halfway across the room is inhaling halfway into the lungs.