Dark Ecstatic Dance: Free Movement & Deep Sound Journeys with Gong

Dark Ecstatic Dance: Free Movement & Deep Sound Journeys with Gong

"They should... drop a ladder deep into their own bodies and climb down it. Let them pluck the darkness from within their own bodies and eat it.”

— Tatsumi Hijikata

Dark Ecstatic Dance is a new Butoh Mutations offering of collective dance and free-movement. The format was developed during the April 2026 Arctic Butoh Mutations retreat. It combines breath work and release techniques with a free movement jam through a curated sound journey through deep drone, minimalist and dark electronic music, indigenous vocal traditions, and live gong accompaniment. 

The session offers an open-form, non-judgemental dance space. It is a place for Butoh Mutations participants to improvise and deepen their practice, and also an invitation for those who are simply curious — including people with no prior experience of Butoh or dance — to dip into Butoh as a dance of darkness.

The 2.5 -hour gathering follows energetic principles. Movement arises from deepening the breath, working with sensation and imagery, and spontaneous movement rather than steps or technique. The sound journey offers an acoustic portal into rich encounters with inner landscapes.

The session unfolds in three phases:

• Arrival and descent (30 minutes): participants are gently guided into bodily sensation through breath practices, and sensory exercises.

• Immersion (90 minutes): continuous open, self-directed dancing on the open floor.

• Return and integration (30 minutes): a soft landing through rest, reflection, sharing, drawing or journaling, accompanied by warm tea.

This is a ritual dance space — welcoming, exploratory, and grounded in embodied listening, a place to encounter the unknown in your own body.

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