Butoh Dance Body Shop

“I am a body shop; my profession is the business of human rehabilitation, which goes today by the name of dancer.”
— Tatsumi Hijikata

What does it mean to rehabilitate the body through dance? How might we recover our capacity to move with creative courage, and go beyond habitual patterns? In this ‘body shop’ we focus on states of imbalance, with live gong accompaniment to awaken the imagination.

Through the body's relationship to the spine as an axis between earth and sky, we investigate emotions linked to stability and instability, and attune to forces such as our responses to light, darkness, colour, air, sound that shape our movement. Encountering gravity not simply as something to resist, but as a force to listen and respond to, we explore how dance can emerge from falling, yielding, suspension and the constant negotiation between control and surrender.

Drawing on Butoh practices from numerous lineages including Ko Murobushi,  the Ohno’s, Masaki Iwana, Natsu Nakajima and , Noguchi Taiso and Seitai release techniques, somatic research and ritual practices, we will work with stillness, breath, subtle sensation and micro-movement to awaken the body's inner landscapes. Images, elemental forces and the imagination become invitations to move beyond the familiar, cultivating the courage to enter the unknown through improvisation.

From solo explorations to shared improvisations,we learn to support one another's processes of transformation, and discover dance as a practice of rehabilitating and remembering our own embodied knowing.

No dance experience is necessary. The workshop is open to anyone curious about the body's possibilities beyond habitual movement. 

The invitation is to discover what becomes possible when we venture into the unknown and allow the body to encounter the world anew.

Please wear loose clothes and thick socks to dance in.

What to expect

• Spine, balance and gravity: exploring the body's relationship to the ground, its shifting centre, and the forces that sustain or unsettle us.

• Release and embodied awareness: Japanese release techniques, breath work and somatic explorations that deepen sensitivity to internal movement.

• Inner landscapes and elemental forces: using imagery, sensation and one-pointed attention (ekāgratā) to discover movement arising beyond conscious intention.

• The courage to improvise: developing physical imagination, responsiveness and a willingness to enter unfamiliar states of movement.

• Solo, paired and collective dance: moving between individual inquiry and shared improvisation, practising the art of witnessing and being witnessed.

About the facilitator

Dominique Savitri Bonarjee is an artist, dancer and researcher whose work explores the contemporary and cosmic resonances of Japanese Butoh. She is the author of Butoh, as Heard by a Dancer (Routledge, 2024), a book bringing together the voices and embodied knowledge of a generation of pioneering Butoh artists in Japan.

Her practice extends Butoh’s legacy of rebellion through somatic research, ritual and spiritual traditions, exploring the body as a site of transformation across an exploratory and multi-disciplinary art practice. She holds a PhD in Contemporary Art from Goldsmiths, University of London, for her research in embodied knowing entitled Space of the Nameless.

Through her project Butoh Mutations, she develops spaces for collective exploration in which dance becomes a practice of listening, unlearning and reimagining our relationship with the world.

Art website: http://spaceofthenameless.art

Instagram: @butoh_mutations @spaceofthenameless