Butoh is a kinda sorta dance named for a diverse range of activities, techniques and motivations .

The Butoh dance/performance/movement is inspired by the Ankoku-Butoh movement.

It involves:

1. playful and grotesque imagery,

2. taboo topics

3. extreme or absurd environment

4. is traditionally “performed” in white-body makeup with slow hyper-controlled motion, with or without an audience.

5. There is no set style and have no movement at all.

6. Its origins have been attributed to Japanese dance legends Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno.

The Kyoto Journal categorizes Butoh as dance, theater, “kitchen”, or “seditious act”.

The San Francisco Examiner describes Butoh as “unclassifiable” (“strangest, most unclassifiable, and most haunting)”. In other words if they don’t know what to call it in San Francisco, it ain’t got a name.

The San Francisco Weekly calls is it a kind of “world” of “restaurant theater” in a skid row context.

Butoh occurs in:

1. areas of extremes of the human condition- skid row

2. extreme physical environments, caves with no audience (so, if nobody is watching, is s/he really dancing?)

3. remote Japanese cemetery

4. hanging by ropes from a skyscraper

or in a bar in Beijing by Chinese Malaysian Lee Swee Keong who performed “Man and God.”

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