Butoh is an avant-garde dance form that came out of post-war Japan in 1959, partly in reaction to the clean aesthetics of traditional Japanese dance. It incorporates rhythms of extreme slowness, playful and grotesque images, and gestures borrowed from the natural world and from the extremes of the human condition.

Butoh is a slowing down of movement to the point that any single movement, eclipsed by and detached from the sequence of movement and of completion in general, transforms into something else. This unknowable thing is a trace, is a stick dragged in the mud by a bodiless spirit. The principles of non-fixity, emptiness, and radical subjectivity are paramount here. 

Butoh incorporates both habitual gestures and learned gestures. In our translation methodologies, we attempt to detach a word from its referentiality, to free it from the tethers of its idiomatic reality. The potential is radical and infinite.