Salish Sea Butoh 2025 Festival Performances

ABOUT BUTOH:
Butoh is an avant-garde form of contemporary dance-theater that originated in Tokyo, Japan after WWII. It is characterized by physical movements that move towards the earth and the subconscious. Butoh, which is influenced by Surrealism, Dada, French Existentialism, German Expressionism, Japanese theater forms Kabuki and Noh, and East Asian spiritual thought, was first developed in the late 1950s and 1960s through experimental performances in Tokyo led by founder Tatsumi Hijikata and his collaborators Kazuo Ohno, Yoko Ashikawa and others. Their work established Butoh as a form of dance performance that is disciplined and rigorous, yet spontaneous and idiosyncratic, intellectual and philosophical, yet grounded in the human body. Instead of aspiring to an aesthetic ideal, Butoh reveals the primordial human being and the inner world. It implies total presence where dance is an expression of being in the world as well as containing the world within oneself. Butoh grows from themes such as dreams, ghosts, androgyny, nature, solitude, and the natural cycles of life and death. It continues to evolve into a global artform in the 21st century.