The Big Bang of Bay Area Butoh Historical Highlights of Butoh What Bay Area Artists Have to Say About Butoh
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What Is Butoh?

A handful of Bay Area artists speak their mind

“A big part of butoh is about not being able to put your finger on something. But one thing that has hit me quite clearly it that it is far beyond a dance technique. It’s a way of life.”

Molly Barrons
Associate Producer of the SF Butoh Festival, San Francisco, CA

“The Graham technique is based on Martha Graham’s body. The Limon technique, the Horton technique, it fits their body. If you follow that technique you follow someone else’s body. That’s why so many people get injured dancing. You do not think about following your own body. This is my body. What kind of movement can I do with my body? All these ideas butoh gave to me. I have come to myself.”

Takami Craddock
Choreographer, Dancer, & Teacher, San Francisco, CA

“Tom White, Max Morales and I have been doing an new art form called ‘Buto-Drawing’ where we combine butoh philosophy with contemporary drawing...Butoh has worked into my professional life. Art is my life, my life is my art.

It’s all integrated. I am fully conscious in being a more directed human being.”

Betty Joe Costanzo,
CCAC Art Professor, San Francisco, CA

“For me, I feel like people are beginning to look beyond Japan, to try to make butoh indigenous in some way, whether evolving a more Western theater style or cabaret style. In my case, a Native American style. I am very interested in Native American culture, how it reflect on the land and what we can learn from the land.”

John Doyle
Dancer, Oakland, CA

“When I choreograph a piece, I choose to draw from butoh imagery to express a deep, deep, painful and raw, hard to bring to the surface feeling. It’s a desire to break out of a place of pain into light, a re-birthing.”

Leigh Evans
Choreographer & Teacher, Oakland, CA

“Many people think butoh is one thing—naked bodies painted white with grotesque achingly slow moves, a dance of darkness. But to me, butoh is actually about finding your own dance. There’s lots of different styles, more than just Sankei Juku and Eiko & Koma out there.”

Brechin Flournoy
Founder/Director of SF Butoh Festival, San Francisco, CA

“It’s something you feel it, something that shakes you, something emotionally radiant. There’s a lot of ranges of butoh. Sometimes it’s just horror, sometimes comical. butoh is a free form. I think anybody can take their own way and personalize it.”

Kinji Hayashi
Butoh Performer Artist, Berkeley, CA

“For me, it’s a spiritual transformation. For Asian Americans, a lot of our pain comes from racism, and even the effects of our family upbringing because of the stress of living in America as a minority, not having a voice. We put so many barriers to our pain. It’s a kind of empowerment, with butoh looking at pain, and using butoh to heal it. To heal you have to feel. It’s a very powerful form.”

Judith Kajiwara
Solo Butoh Artist, Oakland, CA

“Spirit of butoh? Hey, that’s a loaded one! Hmm ... It’s the opposite of rigidness. butoh is maniacal laughter runningdown the streets. The spirit of butoh is also morning dew evaporating in the sunlight. For me, butoh is about bringing in more of the human being, getting lost in the image, when the human peeks out from that state, in acknowledgement of your condition.”

Shinichi Momo Koga
Artistic Director of InkBoat, Berkeley, CA

“To me, it’s about getting in touch with the elemental, tapping into the primordial essence of life. When I am dancing in the likeness of butoh, there is a sense of timelessness. I am in between past, present and future. When I went to Japan to study with Kazuo Ohno, I found out how Butoh could have come from that society, how uniquely Japanese it is. I found out I am not crazy anymore. I’ve walked this path before.”

Claudine Naganuma
Artistic Director of Asian American Dance Performances, Oakland, CA

“It has made a difference in the kind of work that has been accepted. It has deepened in a psychological way some of the work I’ve done...working from the interior instead of the exterior. I think it’s a form that has affected all artists in San Francisco, and not just dancers. I work on new forms now.”

Sachiko Nakamura,
Solo Performance Artist, San Francisco,CA