ABSTRACT

Butoh dance opened my senses to an unseen, mysterious, buried, and fragile world, disrupting my assumptions and expectations of order. In 1999, I and thirteen other choreographers (from Japan, Europe and the Americas) participated in the German-based international Butoh dance-exchange and performance festival known as eX… it!’99. Our discussions led us to this agreement: “Butoh is life, life is Butoh.” We agreed on nothing else, arguing incessantly about the form, intent, spirit, and validity of any one particular dancer’s definition of butoh.