Showing posts with label Butoh-based dance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Butoh-based dance. Show all posts
Friday, March 06, 2009
White, a Butoh-inspired dance by Brenda Clews
A poetry in motion. I played with negatives. It reminds me of ice and snow, of liberation from constraint. Of imaging between being and non-being. Of the mother. Of the sorrow of the mother earth. Of disappearing into and emerging from. Of the continuous cacophony of the dance of life. Of the disjointed, an awkward grace. The film loses some of its quality in the uploaded video: the semi-opague layers appear more like faded images than the transparencies they are. Yet you let go of the white leaf and let it float out to the sea. I wanted to add a poem, and perhaps that's next. The flowers are from photographs I took last year of mandalas of fresh flowers in the street outside an Indian restaurant in honour of a Hindu festival. The increasing presence of the flowers behind the screen of the dance is a reminder of what is ever-present, profundita natura, the profundity of nature at its most beautiful, fragile, transitory, in the flower. I leave you with a screen of flowers, like a prayer.
Hi beautiful friends, Sharing 'White, a Butoh-inspired dance.'.. film clip from late last Summer, and then all last night editing (editing video I'm discovering is like that:-) ...layering... images, sounds, yet not wanting to disturb the vulnerability, perhaps strangeness, of this 'silent film'... Butoh can express the painful and beautiful paradoxes of life in an intimacy that is almost unbearable to watch, I don't know if this film has that, but it's in the intent.
Feedback is always wonderful as I stumble down the path of this art form.
If 'White' opens something out in you, even in resistance, or in a sense of discomfort, then that is the Butoh influence, and then I'll know your reaction is like mine. For I don't know who that woman is, something else takes hold, another energy flows through.
Many thanks for taking the time to look at this. Many thanks for the blessing you are in my life,
hugs, Brenda xo
direct link to the video at YouTube: White, a Butoh-inspired dance.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
(4:16) On Butoh-based Dance: A Saturday morning amble...
Discussing Butoh-based dance having just completed a 4 day workshop with Denise Fujiwara in Toronto, Canada.
Ok, so. My first iMac video on Butoh-based dance with a poem in my white flannel nightgown this morning.
Even before coffee. I leave as is. Though I did add the poem later this evening and you might have to increase the volume since, though I re-recorded a number of times much closer to the computer's built-in microphone than the original clip, I wasn't able to arrive at the same volume levels.
In the emptiness of the dancer everything comes to be. I hope I imparted this in my little experimental video. Sharing a recent experience which I am in the process of understanding.
Strange and surreal as it appears, the intensity of the dancers, intimacy, exposure, vulnerability are the core of Butoh.
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YouTube URL here
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Butoh Dancers
do not express but expose embodied emotion
in the Noh tradition of restraint
line of red belts on the kimonos
the dancers move towards us
as slowly as the moon bleeds through the sky
they are intermittently earth, water, fire, air
gone are the wild rhythms of their bodies
they are empty silk shells on the stage
who reveal their intimate selves
what is most human
our contradictory states
our warring, our longing, our loving
without the effort of thought
we who do not watch
or even witness
a performance
rather we complete
their process
of us
© 2008, Brenda Clews
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