Butoh and Yoga: Exploring Embodied Consciousness Through Movement and Stillness
Guest Post by Paul Michael Henry
I am not a yoga practitioner, though I have some experience of it (mainly Ashtanga style). But I’m excited at starting my Butoh Dance classes at Merchant City Yoga, and have been thinking about the similarities and contrasts between the two practices. The most obvious common ground is probably to be found in the root definition of yoga as a yoking or joining. If we extend this definition towards reuniting then I think yoga can meet Butoh with a shared intention.
Butoh is a dance form, originating in mid-twentieth century Japan, and as such it is something which may be performed for others (unlike yoga). But many people, including my regular students, use it rather as a way to explore the relation of their conscious and unconscious minds to their bodies, and to extend and electrify these things by playing with their relation to the environment, to time and space, to spirit and dream, life and death. Butoh is concerned with bodily repression and the way our social conditioning leaves us alienated from ourselves. Its opening moves are a form of yoga in as much as they reunite us with a larger self by awakening the embodied imagination hidden beneath all this conditioning.
There are no asanas here. I occasionally teach one of the set choreographies that exist within the Butoh corpus, but my main focus is on enabling the original movement of your own unique, never-to-be-repeated bodymind. There is physical training and conditioning however – mainly in the form of Noguchi Taiso exercises, which are a gentle system for making friends with gravity and fluidity, losing tension, and moving with more ease and potential for change.
A key word in Butoh is metamorphosis. We start with the assumption that our bodies contain the whole cosmos, evolutionarily and ecologically inherited – the genealogical chain that extends through our parents all the way back to the fish and critters, and the sunshine, ocean tides, and tree breath that constantly flow into and out of us. Dancing in Butoh is the experience of transformation. This process is powered by falling in love with images both natural and surreal, deeply enough that we start to become them. This may sound quite strange but in practice I have never encountered anyone who can’t engage with it.
I call my workshops The Dreaming Body because it seems to me that we are always in one dream state or another: the grey dream of capitalism, or the more exciting and fulfilling ones we can unlock by learning to play with our dreams through the body. In this way it’s a bit like lucid dreaming done whilst still awake. Returning to the common turf Butoh shares with yoga: this dance form is a yoking or re-joining of our minds with our bodies, and of both of these with the imagination we were all born with but tend to forget in the trudge towards adulthood.
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