Min Yoon – From Self-Erasure to Self-Exposure — what is post/butoh dance?
Min was invited to LAKE to articulate “What is post/butoh dance?” How does a form reject/renew/re-member a dance form / philosophy originally created to reject? Min will research post/butoh dance as a living tradition, evolving and reflecting on former performance scores, and documenting new impulses in the body.
While I’ve been calling my work post/butoh dance for more than 7 years now, I keep some practices inside the body and away from the world of words.
At LAKE Studios, Marcela Giesche invited to focus on and share about post/butoh dance.
This is the beginning of these reflections & soft illuminations.
[[[There are secrets within my body I reveal on stage yet within many bounds of protection within a dreamier space. Words of my body’s secrets may also remain private in my notebooks abstracted in performances. Years later, I attempt to share & articulate into our shared worlds of words and images.]]]
Butoh dance started as a dance of rebellion and processing the atrocities post-WWII in Japan. It has been evolving as an international avant-garde dance form characterized by aesthetics of death including white paint, representing a loss and giving of the self. While butoh dance has become possibly more popularized in Europe and places outside of Japan (possibly due to more support for the arts), butoh dance was still beautifully and complexly created in while simultaneously rebelling from Japanese culture and connections to Japanese arts and spirituality. As a Korean-American body now living in Berlin, I position myself with the Korean culture who lost much in wars with Japan, and with privilege of access to US and European resources, dialogues of appropriation, and with cultures of honoring and rebelling. Also appreciating dance as a practice, experimenting in one of the most idyllic studios in Berlin where the body weather is Beauty…
My departure toward post/butoh started when my butoh master Atsushi Takenouchi said that I am already doing my own thing and to lean into this, after years of devotion to butoh dance trainings, and with inspirations from my American dance teacher and dear friend Mizu Desierto who integrates permaculture and queer ecologies with butoh. My departure moves from self-erasure philosophies of butoh to Self-exposure / vulnerability / connection in times of trauma-informed? polycrises.
At LAKE studio, these were scores for my body:
- evolve old scores
- personal translation
- many different doorways into the subconscious
- possession as a somatic inquiry
- relational beyond anger / rebellion / outcry
I discovered transitional states between erasure and exposure states and ways to depict this across stage, space, and audience. Look forward to experimenting more.
[This time around, I found it easy to pour the practice into many pages of notes.]
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Merging, loss, and individuation, I give myself to Butoh and distance myself from, to find my Self in these many cycles.
While honoring Butoh, I dance at the edges… post/Butoh.
depictions of being human
wanting to be human
staying with the depths of self
brightly, darkly,
Min
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Later this year, I am excited to be translating post/butoh dance into cinema with LAKE Studio’s On Display Residency. More soon.
photo by Maria Kousi