The Sand Hill Review http://www.sandhillreview.org
2005
Butoh Figures,
—ankoku
Butoh: darkness dance,
the naked body on the
edge of crisis,
a dead body standing
with desperate effort,
always the circle of
life and death,
the something unknown
beyond.
These whitened figures that have emerged from
the twilit
fog of pulverized concrete, who walk
purposefully
or aimlessly out from the center—it is not
the right name to give them. Yet my eye thinks
of it,
recalling what’s been seen in other photographs
of the new danse
macabre: those lean-limbed, chalky,
wraith-like
bodies articulating unspeakable visions,
which serve now in memory as mute premonition.
But is it only the dust clothing the entirety
of each of them, revealing every privacy,
that has led me to this error, that sees in
them
naked Butoh forms,
harrowing as the first ones?
Only the white shawls of ash, the blood ribboned ash,
only this sudden shiver, a false recognition?