You walk into Roble Gym expecting, I don’t know, something mystical maybe. Incense. Robes. The kind of earnest California spirituality that makes you want to jump off a bridge.
What you get instead is bodies. Real bodies, doing impossible things with physics. These dancers move like they’re negotiating a peace treaty with the floor, every muscle screaming in slow motion. It’s brutal. Beautiful, sure, but brutal first.
“A dialogue with gravity,” he calls it. Which sounds poetic until you watch someone spend forty-five minutes lowering themselves six inches while looking like they’re being torn apart from the inside. This isn’t dance as performance, it’s dance as excavation. Like they’re digging something out of themselves one agonizing movement at a time.
This is Stanford, not some temple in Kyoto. But somehow that makes it better. More honest. These dancers didn’t come here to transcend the body, they came to inhabit it so completely it becomes something else entirely.
Fifty years they’ve been doing this. Fifty years of falling down and getting back up in the most difficult way imaginable. That’s not art. That’s devotion bordering on insanity. And yes, I respect the hell out of it.
Butoh belongs both to life and death. It is a realization of the distance between a human being and the unknown. It also represents man’s struggle to overcome the distance between himself and the material world. Butoh dancers bodies are like a cup filled to overflowing, one which cannot take one more drop of liquid- the body enters into a perfect state of balance.
Sankai Juku Master Class at Stanford University
presented by Aleta Hayes and Stanford Arts.