Butoh is a mysterious, dark and difficult discipline, it is elusive and complex. Its borders are blurred, it emerged within the world of dance but it is very close to performance art and theater itself. Visually it seems identifiable due to the unique way their performers are used to make up their entire body in white, but that is not an imperative, a Butoh dancer can go naked and without makeup or masked and with huge and quirky costumes. It seems that most of his movements are slow and dense, but it is not an imperative either, the impulsiveness that they feed on leads to enormous variations in speed and quality of movement and energy. Butoh was created in the 1950s as part of the avant-garde movement around the world, it was initiated as a response to the enormous weight of tradition in Japanese performing arts and as a counterweight to the North American cultural invasion that caused the defeat of the second world war. Butoh emerged as part of a rebellious urban subculture in Tokyo, tackling scandalous issues. Today, 70 years later, the spectrum of their creative themes and goals has expanded in such a way that it has been dissolved inside the consumer society and inside neo-hippie, holistic and ritualistic movements; but a good part of its underground and anti-establishment vibe remains. It is no longer Japanese, it is created and re-created all over the world with the freedom contributed by different individuals from different cultures, and being anti-traditional, of course there is no tradition to follow.

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Butoh is a performing art of dedication and commitment, of honesty and encounter, of artistic and personal manifestation, Butoh speaks of the entire universe in its own movement, of religion in the only way our individuality can refer to it, of philosophy as if the source of philosophy were knowledge by movement, of the intangible soul that impulses the movement of any person, of life and death always flowing around each other. The boundaries between the real and the magical are blurred in this dance. It is a dance that comes from digging into nature, into the other, into our bodies, and yes, our souls. Butoh wants to bring back the sensual movement of our memories, of our ancestors, then we dance with our inner presences and with our inner ghosts. Butoh is a language communicated by dancing de inner self.

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“Mapping” and “Digging” are the terms I have come to, that symbolizes and brings together the experience that practicing Butoh provokes in the performer: the creation of maps that little by little take us literally inside the body where we dig for the sources of our own creativity and movement. That source that causes the flow of the unified movement, where mind and body are united since their origin. Exploring the territoriality of that body, finding points where it is decided to excavate and little by little going deeper and deeper within oneself will be our exploration. Whoever is digging here should not do it to stay inside that hole that he or she has created, we should thinks as a performers, in search of something -even if we don’t know what exactly is and, no matter how small be the discovery,- our desire should be to bring it to light, exposing it, offering it, be it brute stones, sand, objects from the past, rough diamonds, memories or fuel sources that move our flesh and humanity. In the same way that we create a map to find the place of our excavation, in the same way we use that map to leave it and to return to the world and exposing it to dance. The path through this journey are the maps of our excavation is our Butoh workshop, it will be our way of dancing, it will be our way of a self discovery and possibly spiritual sublimation.