Butoh is a thought on life and a song to it
the ocean's current
I am a butoh artist and choreographer. I collaborate with contemporary dancers, musicians, painters, poets, film directors as well as diverse types of institutions to create multidisciplinary, butoh-inspired works. However, through the ever-shifting ocean of my activities flows a steady current: my main passion — giving body to different spirits, or what in Japan are called “yokai.”
My figures (such as Klara K, Lady Bird, and The Mire) are aspects of ourselves that we either do not usually want to look at (envy, obsession, grief, hunger, loneliness, hidden desires) or that escape our notice (moments of tenderness, dreams that become foggy and are forgotten, bodily memory, etc). Thus, they are born from either excess, subtlety, or both.
The ocean
That said about the ocean’s current, the ocean of my work focuses on the uniquely human desire to become a complete stranger to oneself—to transform into something beyond the human, like a tree or a bird. My practice explores this paradox of human un-humanness. My dance is a shapeshifting practice.
In general, I understand butoh as a transformative dance centred on the embodied imagination, where the dancer is no longer the one who moves but the one who is moved by images of thought in combination with bodily sensations. Without a fixed technique, butoh remains an art in constant search and renewal. It is often called a dance of life, one that embraces all forms and expressions, defying beauty standards and refusing to ground itself in attraction or seduction. For me, it is also a dance of the soul—where invisible forces that shape human existence are given form—rooted in honesty, deep exposure and acute listening.
In a world of immediacy — of on-demand entertainment and same-day delivery, of curiosity that dies in its nascent state when answers are instantly provided by AI — butoh is longing without an object one can grasp, and a dwelling in questions for which there are no answers.
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