White butoh is not born as the opposite of Tatsumi Hijikata’s ankoku butoh. By using the word white I insist on the philosophical defense of ankoku butoh: whoever practices butoh must fully expose the darkness of their existence. The thrust of white butoh is to go to the very bottom of the essence of butoh, which precedes forms and movements — that is, to pursue the realities of life.

Masaki Iwana

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Texture is the organization of the elements that make up the matter of any body. The texture of the everyday body is skin, nail, hair, saliva. The texture of the body that dances butoh is also stone, river, leaf, cloud. The body that dances butoh is made of time, matter and life; coated in a fragile, porous identity. It is a body made of world, as well as of person.

The territory of selfhood is the body that contains it. The matter of this landscape, in its basic principles, is shared with the body of the world. This connection between everyday body and world-body lets us access other territories of the body. In this case, landscapes.

For a landscape to exist, there must be an observer. On becoming landscape through dance, the first observer is the person dancing. We work at the speed of the landscape — a speed that makes the body lose its everydayness, and at the same time lets us observe more precisely the landscape forming in the dance. In this way we train the outer eye, which lets us go deeper into the dance.

When a butoh dancer dances stone, or mud, or mist, or water — they become that matter. They pass through their own selfhood and immerse themselves in the experience of being the matter that dances. Again and again, reborn in nature.

what we’ll work on

• Body as landscape and bodily texture
• Time, matter and life as elements of transformation
• Becoming matter — stone, mud, mist, water
• Dances of choreographic landscapes
• Selfhood and the outer eye
• The speed of the landscape
• Fractality: each part as a whole, the whole as a part

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upcoming dates