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. This image is useful because, by imagining ourselves as empty space, we free ourselves from intention and become pure listening to internal and external forces—a listening that keeps nothing for oneself. We become space, or “nothingness,” since the vessel defines a perfect space to be invaded. Movement is the effect of receiving the other; we follow what we hear and what enters us. In this way, we can be possessed or become "everything.”

However, there are many traps here: we are never truly empty because we are made of stable and changing forces that pass through us and connect us to the world, even if we do not listen to them or dance with them. To listen is to be attentive to what remains and what changes; it is to invite the new and to host the old.

On the other hand, if the image of the empty vessel is purely mental (if we repeat like a magic formula, “I want to be an empty vessel”), it will not work. One becomes an empty vessel when intention is reduced to the minimum and sensitivity toward the body is very high: when one listens to what calls or passes through and loses oneself in it, like in the waves of the sea.

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