The clown falls toward emotion; butoh, toward sensation. They meet in the imagination.

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Both clown and butoh seek an essential communication: one on the human level, the other on the existential level. The two languages share elements that, in the eyes of the audience, make them very close. In both, failure is unhooked from success and social conventions are skipped. Both accept diversity as a creative force and need honest, transparent communication. And both dwell outside the realm of reason: clown toward emotion, butoh toward sensation, with imagination as the shared space of fusion.

The clown creates a direct connection between the gaze and the heart, through which it shares emotions with the audience sincerely and transparently. Its naivety and literalness make it fail at what it should be good at — and, at the same time, its greatest success is the acceptance and living-through of that failure. As audience or as performers, we can look at ourselves through its eyes without judging ourselves, and laugh at ourselves.

Butoh brings us closer to the body’s potential for being and lets us remember its belonging to what is foreign. It helps us break forms and limits, integrate duality —life and death, space and void, consciousness and unconsciousness, masculine and feminine, form and non-form—. It invites us to inhabit a psychophysical space where we stop being ourselves without ceasing to be so, activating the ancestral memory stored in each of our cells.

What happens when these two languages meet on stage? Tenderness, abstraction, possession, play, lightness, solemnity. The impossible opens before us from the most disparate angles.

what we’ll work on

• Failure as fertile territory, not as defeat
• The gaze of the clown and the listening of butoh
• Vulnerability before the audience as a scenic engine
• Play and solemnity inhabiting the same body
• Imagination as a bridge between emotion and sensation

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butoh + clown can be experienced as a single experience or unfold across a cycle of three encounters, each with its own territory. A possibility of deepening for bodies that want to travel the whole path:

The cycle is scheduled according to demand and the group’s interest. Write to me if you’re drawn to travel it whole.

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who it’s for

For all bodies, and you can manage the difficulty by taking each exercise at your level. It’s good to arrive with experience in one of the two languages —butoh or clown—, or in both: it’s not a starting point from scratch, but an encounter between two practices you already inhabit a little. A workshop that exists outside the ni.butoh paths: you can take it at any moment of your journey, or as an independent experience.

want to come? write to me →