Butoh Dictionary

A Shadowbody floor exercise where the floor has paint (pick a color) and the participant want to get this paint to reach every part of your body so one must roll accordingly.

A Shadowbody exercise where one participant manipulates a sheet of paper. Another participate mirrors the exact manipulates of the paper. If, for instance, the paper is put into a ball, the mirroring participant goes into a ball.

A very common exercise in other dance circles and physical theatre.

In Shadowbody, with one blindfolded participant, another manipulates the body of another in whichever way that resonates. The leader/puppet master choses the resistance of the blindfolded participant (0% to 100%). After, the blindfolded participant attempts to remember the manipulations and reenacts them.

This is a Shadowbody mirroring exercise in a circle. One individual turns into a monster and passes this monster shape and feel around a circle. Once the monster is passed, the passer returns to a neutral state. We try to get the demon rotating around as quickly as possible. Mirroring the sound is also recommended.

At Subbody, stands for a surprise in performance. Inspired by a story of Tatsumi Hijikata being surprised by finding a peacock in his neighbor's residence.

In Shadowbody, the perfect image relates to the most ideal qualia or world, whether literal or abstract that adequately represents our internal environment.

Finding the perfect image is a shortcut in moving in a particular way. If we find the perfect image to embody, movement and choreography will come more easily.

Example: Tatsumi Hijikata found many perfect images for himself. One of the most known butoh-fus was the bugs crawl where bugs would gradually crawl on the body. This gives the body a typical butoh look with whole body detail dance that can be identified as a butoh trope.

In Shadowbody, this is a portmanteau play on words "observer" and "performer" where deterritorialized audience/guests breaks the bounds of what typically would be known as audience. In performance art, for instance, when there is audience interaction, the audience has stepped outside of the bounds of mere observer and mixed with performer.

Butoh intersecting with pop culture, often blurring the line between authenticity and parody.

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

Example: Religious or spiritual possession

Another term for proto-performance coined by performance theorist Richard Schechner to describe the activity directly before the actual performance.

Oftentimes, the preparation before an actual butoh performance is the beginning of the performance itself or at least the beginning of a kind of ceremony or ritual.

Example: Putting on the white body paint.

A focus in the now of the internal and external environment. It is actively being here now. Presence is related to butoh scholar P Liao’s 2nd stage of butoh creation he calls encountering.

Presence is directly tied to resonance.

In Shadowbody, this is the exploration of beauty and ugliness in the face inspired by the subreddit where girls submit what they deem is one attractive photo and one not attractive one. Some resulting transformations are impressive. Find your most beautiful face, followed by the most ugly.

In Shadowbody, this is a prop metamorphosis exercise where person A gives a prop in one context to Person B but Person B has a different context for it.

A Shadowbody term describing when the dancer embodies movement under the imagined conditions of prosthetic limbs—for example, a prosthetic leg or prosthetic feet.

In performance theory, Richard Schechner uses the term proto-performance to describe all of the activities, behaviors, and processes that occur before the performance proper begins. It is the preparatory stage, encompassing rehearsals, training, warm-ups, costuming, make-up, rituals of readiness, and even the informal interactions among performers.

In butoh, the proto-performance of applying the makeup is very important and often seen as a ritual in and of itself, e.g. of purifying the body before the performance.