Rosemary Candelario to give keynote workshop and lecture at 2021 World Dance Alliance - Americas conference
2021 Virtual Conference & Festival Assembly
Ecologies Of and Through the Body
April 22-29, 2021
Workshop: Butoh Ecologies
Saturday, April 24, 2021 @ 12:00 pm CST
This live butoh workshop, which can be done in any convenient outdoor or indoor space with internet connection, will focus on exercises that encourage participants to shift their perceptions of their bodies from that of an individual human self ending at the skin to that of a porous entity inseparable from the more-than-human world. Using images, sensations, and physical movements, we will explore butoh as ecological dance. No butoh experience necessary.
Lecture: Butoh Ecologies
Sunday, April 2, 2021 @ 12:00 pm CST
Butoh is an avant-garde dance developed in Japan in the late 1950s and 1960s that has since become global and multiply-local. Butoh’s emphasis on the transformation of the dancer into something else (a tree, an animal, a mythic creature) along with a strong focus on themes of nature has led many butoh practitioners to develop an ecological focus for their dance, adapting the form to many different landscapes all over the world. This approach neither engages the environment as a backdrop for dance such as in site-specific dance, nor as an aesthetic object in its own right as in land art, nor as a theme about which to dance. Instead, butoh acts as a kind of ecological methodology, reminding participants and spectators that they are not isolated from their surroundings, and asking them to consider how to exist together in a given area.
This talk traces a historiography and praxis of butoh as ecological dance that offers possibilities to alter our collective understanding of bodies and the earth, and to train people to shift out of habitual patterns and into new ecological ways of being. Various ways butoh dancers make connections between their dance and their local landscapes and learn to use butoh to sense themselves as part of diverse environments will be discussed. Nature-oriented butoh practices, I suggest, provide participants an experience of being enmeshed with their surroundings, and ask them to learn how to dance with, not in, the more-than-human world.