Butoh Art: Philosophy and Practice

Butoh is not a style to be copied. It is a way of meeting what is already here: the body, the moment, and the people around us.

What Is Butoh?

Butoh is a form of physical and psychological training, and an intriguing method of performance. It can be shockingly, even humorously unruly, yet it is also deeply traditional, to the point of being ritualistic.

Butoh can recall archaic tunes, colors, and reverberations of the past that we cannot quite put into words but that touch our inner landscape. Still, Butoh is very concrete. The body is always concrete, never abstract.

In Butoh, the foundation is experience and the body, not shape or aesthetic agreement. The body is powerful and enriched by experience. In Butoh, we meet moments that leave us amazed at our resilience, diversity, and strength, each born from our own starting point.

Curious where Butoh comes from, and what a performance looks like? See the Performances page.

Contacting the Essence

The aim of Butoh is to contact a person’s essence, to reach the embryonic, latent source that every human being carries. Each of us is a singular creation. Butoh invites us out of imitation: of other dancers, of expectations, and of the image of ourselves we have learned to present.

Through the experience of simply being, the person and the performer become, for a moment, exposers of potential. They let what is possible in the moment show itself, free from ideas of success, performance, or the social flesh. By social flesh I mean the layer of roles, expectations, and rehearsed identity that we wear like a second body. It protects us, and it also keeps us busy. Butoh does not tear it off. It gives it room to quiet, so that something more original can be felt underneath.

This is a movement from fragmentation toward integrity, and toward our own independent creativity. Performances and encounters are not manufactured. They are found. They breathe, stand on their own feet, and approach occurrence: their own value and suchness.

Beyond the Need to Prove

What is essential in Butoh is that the need to prove something, or to verify one’s existence, subsides. So does the hunger to sustain the feeling of existing through constant feedback and stimuli.

Humans are extremely hungry for stimuli, and society feeds that hunger in many ways. It is healthy and healing to take a break from the flood and to learn that even when the self is not constantly reinforced against the noisy outer world, you do not disappear.

Butoh is a skill that lets us see more calmly and clearly by listening to our inner wisdom through body and mind.

Butoh is silence and stillness, the movement of presence, and the laughter of acceptance.

The Inner Landscape

Within the practitioner, the performer, and the viewer there is an inner landscape. In Butoh it comes alive. The surface of the body meets everyday reality and interacts with it. When that interaction is strong, it can create something mutual and communal between people, rising from an archaic space of memories and experiences.

From this space come some of the most influential and meaningful experiences in human life: dance, poetry, myths, fables, art, love, a creative life.

Integrity and Well-Being

Butoh offers experiences and ways of thinking that support the positive side of daily life, strengthening integrity and well-being. A person’s relationship with the world begins with oneself. Butoh’s acceptance of responsibility prepares us for the world through integral experience.

As a result, the relationship between oneself and the world can become less conflicted. As responsibility toward oneself grows, so does our sense of what sustains us.

As an art of integrity, Butoh can unite the doer, the receiver, and society, and nurture the (collective) soul. It is one path to psychological growth. Butoh dancers pursue this by growing toward clarity, harmony, and beauty, and by approaching life’s many facets without criticism.

Butoh as a Way of Life

Butoh can be seen as a way of life, a philosophy, or a principle or attitude toward things, movement, existence, or art.

One aim of Butoh is to offer a way of approaching people and living things without becoming a norm or a system. In my opinion, the only thing Butoh can ask of a person is knowledge of oneself, which gives birth to responsibility for life, and to honesty.

What could be more important in art, or in life?

How We Practice

In Butoh practice, experience, one’s own body, and imagery are the starting points, not form or aesthetic agreement. Inner images become movement and stillness within one’s own unique body.

We explore approaching movement:

• From top to bottom, from bottom to top
• From inside out, from outside in
• From mind to body, from body to mind
• From nowhere to somewhere, from somewhere to nowhere
• From fullness to emptiness, from emptiness to fullness
• From direction to directionlessness, from directionlessness to direction

Slowness gives us time to delve into experience, and gradually trains us to sense body and mind as one whole. Silence is the key to listening, and listening helps us to be present. We work mostly without words and without constructed roles. First we deconstruct: we let inner noise subside and become sensitive to perception. Out of this comes a presence that feels clear and free of static, and the confidence to be here and now, open to the world.

The body is our closest world, and a good place to begin. Movement that arises from our own inner landscape is the language in which mind and body are, paradoxically, one. Butoh is a poetry of movement, not pre-given dance.

No prior experience is needed. Outwardly the movement can be almost imperceptible, and the practice can take place standing, sitting, or lying down. A non-judgmental, listening attitude brings joy, creativity, and courage. It can ease the anxiety of being seen by others and build confidence in one’s own presence.

Health as a Flowing State

Health is a flowing state, not a fixed definition. The good and the bad, the easy and the hard, are all part of human life. Even so, one can feel throughout life like a healthy, living, integral individual.

The Butoh dancer moves and transforms toward a cleansed state of being: existence, the authentic self, the present moment. Butoh lets us pursue this experience and allows it to affect our lives. It does not have to stop when practice pauses.

This is part of Butoh’s integral, healing, and energizing power.

Butoh practice supports well-being, but it is not a medical treatment or a substitute for professional care.

My Path with Butoh

I met Butoh in 2007, and I began teaching it soon after. It felt close to what I had already been seeking through my own experiments, and to what I had found essential in performing and in training others. In 2008 I began training and performing with Odddance Theatre in St. Petersburg. In 2009 I founded butoh.name Mythopoetic Theatre with visual artist Masha Salangina. The theatre was later renamed MO Theatre. My understanding of Butoh has been inspired by Masaki Iwana, Katsura Kan, Atsushi Takenouchi, Aki Suzuki, and Ken Mai.

Butoh grew out of my background in physical theatre and acrobatics. Over the years I found a slow acrobatics of my own, which in hindsight resembles Butoh. In my own words: “I strive to efface the doer, that strange me, and the act.” More of this story is on the Biography page.

Butoh, Photography, and Qigong

These practices share one territory. In Butoh, in self-portrait photography, and in Health Qigong, I am pursuing the same ground: where being meets expression, where presence becomes visible, where the self dissolves into genuine encounter.

• In photography, I do not construct the gesture. I allow it to arise. See the Butoh-Inspired Self-Portrait Photography Series, or the short films.
• In Qigong, I work with the same integration of body, breath, mind, and energy. Qigong works with cultivating and regulating inner processes. Butoh transforms inner experience into authentic movement and stillness. See the Health Qigong videos.

Opening Space, Not Explaining

I do not aim to explain. I aim to open a space.

If this work invites slowness, reflection, or a sense of recognition, that is enough. I hope it works less as a statement and more as a mirror, a place where you can rest, question, or remember something wordless.

Ultimately, this work is about learning to stand inside time without trying to control it, and letting light, hope, love, gratitude, movement, and silence finish the sentence.

Want to try Butoh yourself? No expertise is needed. Your own life experience is already your preparation. See the Butoh workshops.