Friday, February 18, 2011

Weight Shift in Butoh Dance

Having a fascination with the Japanese contemporary dance style Butoh, I have come to write about this interesting dance form once more. Butoh most certainly makes extensive use of weight shift. Being that the dance tends to be more on the detailed and slow side, there is a lot of nuance that must happen with weight. In this video here, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ms7MGs2Nh8, one can see the amount of body intelligence one has to have to be able to pull of this strange, yet slow artform.

I see Butoh as a form of intentional unbalancing and balancing back again. In the video, the dancer throws himself off balance to show that he still has balance. In the video, it appears that every single muscle (or most of them) are contracted. The body is doing so much and the weight shifts are constantly shifting even though the movement through space is limited. The performer appears to be hyper-conscious of his body from his feet up to his head. This is certainly a style of dance I value.

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