I like to see butoh as very connected to our everyday life, grounded in things and ideas found in our world. So when you think of dance, I feel it is often how to move your arm or leg correctly and in the right timing. But in Butoh, for example, we may be asked to dance about our favorite tree in our childhood home, or about a few words in a poem, a color, a painting, our current surroundings, etc. The examples are endless. Butoh offers various approaches to dance through these, but in general asks you to slow down and listen, in a psychological way attuned to emerging emotions, memories, images; physically, sight, sounds, smells, tastes, postures inform our movements, and we learn to develop trust in ourselves and our body to come to articulate movements.

I feel the whole process is akin to something like writing (or any creative process) where thoughts can emerge, be deepened, connected, elaborated, etc, but being a dance heavily involving the body, sensations, and inner impulses, we find a new way to think, be affected, find meaning and feeling in our lives.

In a time where we are often working on digital screens and sedentary, then go do athletic work to maintain our health, our bodies can become stiff and disconnected. Butoh offers a liberating poetic space to feel with our bodies, find meaning, connection, expression, and play, all developing sensitivities to life where our everyday becomes deeply felt intuitively by our body and maintained through this creative practice.