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Presented by invitation at the 7th International Forum of Performance Art in Dràma.

With music by Victor Wetzel.

What is an image-body that dreams, dissolves, and re-forms?

Drawing on Plato’s concept of chōra—the nurse of becoming, the open horizon where forms take shape but remain undefined—this butoh performance explores the interplay of body (or sensation) and mental image (or form) viewed not as opposites, but as entangled forces through which the possible erupts. It embodies the tension between sensation and imagination, between what is not yet and what is. It privileges neither the mental image nor the body, but inquires into the state of their simultaneous formation and dissolution, which is what butoh—often misrepresented as dealing exclusively with the body—is ultimately about.

Furthermore, at the heart of this performance lies somehow the idea of the body and the imagination as being akin to water: formless yet no so completely, a medium of endless possibility. A body and mind that move and vectorize toward form, only to disappear back into potential—like waves that never settle. In this piece, the dance thereby becomes a site of transformation, of unmaking and remaking. Accordingly, the dancer proves not to be a self, but a space—fluid and transient—where selves pass through. This, then, is at once a dance of a becoming that never ends and a meditation on the human being as a limitless potential, a question mark, and hence as equal to chōra.