Paper Thin Reality: Ritual Butoh in Practice

"Your reality is paper-thin" the teacher says to me as I take note after note on the world inside me.  Butoh class has dissolved the world into colored paper, brick, & sweat, and we have all changed Kunststoff Arts and ourselves into something distant.  We are no longer desert dwellers, or city slickers, or neighbors, and the space is no longer a contemporary building on the corner of Market and Grove.  This is a cave; a memory, a smoke filled dream and inside it we are walking.  We are shifting forwards towards the walls, sifting the matter and particles we are made of, turning into molten potential, breaking at the seams.  The paper and fabric of our identities is tearing and we are here together holding each other up as the world we know falls away.

In Butoh, we privilege the state of being over the container.  We travel to altered states of consciousness through the body, and the breath, and imagination alone. Through the body you discover the truth, "I was a dancer all along." Inside of the subconscious there is nothing to fear because everything transforms.  Everything is changing always. Moving farther inwards we discover our nightmares are simply untrue.  Everything you are fighting for, everything you believe in and are desperately reaching for is alive in you.  All around you are the places and people and communities you love, holding you up, loving you dearly. Your dreams are coming true even as you seek to understand what they are, even as difficulty grows you open, and makes room for those changes and shifts that carry you forward.


This is what dance can give you on a rainy Sunday.  This is what the container holds.

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