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.

The liminal space is a location which is a transition between two other locations, or states of being. The modern use of the term is linked back to a 4chan post on /x/ paranormal “post disquieting images that just feel ‘off.'”

Examples of liminal spaces are hallways, waiting rooms, parking lots and rest stops, abandoned malls or empty school hallways. The effect might feel unsettling yet also familiar. Such locals have a potential of being rich dance spaces since butoh has also been viewed as a liminal phenomenon.

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.