Thought maps

My art has never been separate from thought. Before becoming a dancer, I studied philosophy. This page is a space where my reflections on butoh, dance, and my artistic practice take form. Sometimes I reflect alone; sometimes I write in conversation with a book. At other times, I invite someone else to write about something I do not yet know how to express. I hope this page becomes a space for you to explore, be challenged, find inspiration, and perhaps discover the spark to write about dance, art, and life yourself. Also, check out polymorph.blog — forever an inspiration.

publications

Rethinking the Earth–World Divide

Dionysus And Apollo After Nihilism

This book recovers Dionysus and Apollo as the twin conceptual personae of life’s dual rhythm in an attempt to redesign contemporary theory through the reciprocal affirmation of event and form, earth and world, dance and philosophy.

Writings

A little bit on philosophy

We think that because ideas are not material they have no importance: we cannot put them in our apartment or make use of them in an any immediate way.However, although our modern world is obsessed with objects, it is based on ideas.

One hundred ways of butoh or what is butoh

Butoh is not a single aesthetic or method but a constellation of forces, a shifting field of impulses that emerged in postwar Japan and continues to expand today.

Life

Life is planetary exuberance, a solar phenomenon; it is the local—though astronomically proportioned—transformation of the earth’s air, water, and sunlight into cellular tissue; it is a complex pattern of growth and death, expansion and contraction, change and decay; i

Imagination

“[…] we must establish the fundamental principle: that the thought of the heart is the thought of images […] that imagination is the true voice of the heart, so that if we speak with the heart, we must speak imaginatively.”

The Sonic Body

Many times in my workshops we dance without music. Once, I have performed on stage without music, because...The body has its own sonority. Or rather, its sonorities. Or better yet, the body is nothing but a constellation of voices, cadences, harmonics—and noises: crystalline or metallic, earthly or celestial, recognizable or strange.

To Love Is to Blossom

Ibn ‘Arabi writes in Arabic, a Semitic language. “Love” in Arabic is mahabba (just as “to love” in Hebrew is ahab). The common Semitic root from which these words derive is HBB, associated with the idea of “blossoming.”

Does the Bird Die?

A swallow would not be able to say “death,” and I imagine it would not experience it as I do. I live daily with the understanding that one day I will die,

Music and the Gods

In butoh we often dance our imaginary worlds and personal histories. Yet through these images and stories something universal often flickers

Around Butoh and the “Self”

To dance butoh is to merge the real with the unreal. The world becomes your dream, and you dissolve into the world.

An Empty Vessel in Butoh

What does it mean to be an empty vessel? It means to be a delimitation of space that can contain something.

On butoh, hierarchies and age

Butoh carries, historically and culturally, an Asiatic tendency toward hierarchy. This is not accidental; it emerges from social structures in Japan and from artistic lineages that resemble martial arts transmission. The master–student relationship in butoh often mirrors the dojo model: long apprenticeship, obedience, endurance.

Change

Being and becoming

There is a being of a person. That being is in becoming. It is in constant search of its being. At one moment, one is reflected in a friend’s smile; at another, in a sad face. Sometimes one appears in the landscape in which one sees oneself, or in the lazy stare of a cat. The circumstances of one’s existence change, and so do the mirrors. But how should one respond?