Butoh Research Project
Impressions (2009). A film by Florencia Guerberof recorded in Tokyo featuring Yoshito Ohno.
“ The imminent is as immutable as rigid yesterday. There is no matter that rates more than a single, silent letter in the eternal and inscrutable writing whose book is time. He who believes he has left his home already has come back.”
Jorge Luis Borges
Florencia Guerberof works primarily with Butoh vocabulary. The essence of this Japanese avant-garde movement is very present in most of her works. Asian culture strongly inspires her, particularly ancient forms and their relevance in today’s contemporary scene.
Her interest in existentialism leads her to explore the dance of utter darkness. Inspired by Butoh’s conception of the body as something standing in-between life and death, she becomes fascinated by the coexistence of opposite forces held in tension within the dance form.
Through this comprehensive view on the dancing body, she focuses on contrasts and the interplay between pleasure and pain and the social and primal body.
Florencia’s Butoh dance research is ongoing delving deep into Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata’s work through dance theatre training, talks and film screenings. The sessions encourage a creative assimilation of the ideas triggered by Butoh.
The Project aims to explore a specific area of interest relevant to the dancer, actor and visual artist’s practice looking for a profound, authentic and actual form of expression.
Butoh sessions Structure
Theory
Introductory talks on Butoh and Japanese aesthetics including specific bibliography and visual arts related to the movement.
Physical training
The center, balance and collapse. Gravity, weight and lightness.
The body in relation to the ground. Breath: the primordial source of movement. Expansion and contraction. Inside and outside the body. Streams of energy.
Invisible technique
Work through different imagery including animate and inanimate objects. Internalisation of different materials and translation of images into movement.
Creation
The third part focuses on discovering the relevance of Butoh in the dancer, actor and artist’s practice finding a specific area of interest reflected in the creation of a piece in any media of personal choice (dance, performance, theatre, photography, film, painting, sculpture, installation.)
Essential Concepts
The empty body
The body does not move intentionally, but it is moved by something. The body is a blank canvas subject to infinite transformations. The body is black charcoal absorbing the light. “The dancer should not try to display something. A dancer should concentrate on absorbing.” *
*Quote by Nario Gohda from Yukio Waguri’s site: http://www.otsukimi.net/koz/e_yw_antho.html
The desublimated body
Decay is the dance of living organisms. We stand in between life and death. The beauty of fading out. Snow melts, a rain of cherry tree petals falls, and the moon hides by quarters.
Beauty in the horror of the grimace
The distorted, the uncanny and the grotesque. The coexistence of the painful and the pleasant.
The Inside
Movement emerges from a remote zone that hides in the darkness of our own body.
The unleashed body
Movement emerges without thinking in the search for the body’s unconscious impulses.
The Avant-Garde body
Fragmentation and dissociation. Influence of modernist art in dance. The hands, the face and the feet are going separate ways. The mask.
The power of the gaze in dance
The innocent, empty, non seeing, crystal eyes. They don’t see but turn inward reflecting the inner depth of the soul. They can migrate to the sole of the feet and all over the body. A bird’s eye view.
The ground
The worshipped surface from which everything originates.
Presence
Existence in space. Carrying the body weight. Connection with the outside. The ego melts into space. Fusion of the body with the universe.
The other
The internalisation of different beings. The transformation from one state into another. Female and male energy, animal spirits, animated and inanimate objects.
Sensing
To sense the essence of things generating movement from our relation with different materials, atmosphere, temperature, light and darkness.
Space in-between
The void between things. The air around joints and cavities. Space can become narrow and hands minute. Magnificence of the smallest detail. Subtlety and delicacy.
Bibliography
Artaud, A. “The theatre and its Double.”
Bataille, G. “Eroticism.”
Barthes, R. “Empire of signs.”
Baird, B. “Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh. Dancing in a pool of gray grits.”
Centoze, K. “Resistance to the society of the spectacle: the “nikutai” in Ko Murobushi.”
Cheng, F. “Empty and Full.The language of Chinese painting.”
Deleuze, G. “Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation.” Grotowsky, J. “Towards a poor theatre.” Fraleigh, S. “Dancing darkness. Butoh, Zen and Japan”. Freud, S. “The uncanny.” Hearn, L. “Kwaidan” (stories and studies of strange things).
Hosoe, E. “Kamaitachi” photography series.
Ienaga, S. “The Pacific War.”
Onho, K. and Yoshito,“Kazuo Onho´s world from without and within.”
Kojiki, “Records of ancient matters.”
Menninhaus, W. “Disgust, Theory and History of a strong sensation.”
Mishima, Y. “Kinjiki” (Forbidden Colours).
Nieztche, F. “The Birth of Tragedy” Chapter, “The Apolline and Dyonisiac as Art.” Odette, A. & Picon-Vallin B., Buto(s.)
Oe, K. “Hiroshima Notes.”
Richie, D. “A tractate on Japanese Aesthetics.”
Sekien, T. “Gazu Hyakki Yagyo.” (1776).The Illustrated Night parade of a Hundred Demons.
Tanizaki, J. “In praise of shadows.”
Zeami, “The flowering spirit.”
Workshop bookings and updates: www.florenciaguerberof.com florguer@icloud.com