I participated in a butoh dance at Battery Park last weekend – the first public performance I've done in at least a few years. The dance sequence was quite rough, about 35 minutes long, and only rehearsed for a total of 5 or 6 hours in the two days leading up to it. I'll write down a few things I thought and felt while they're still relatively fresh.
I was very surprised how little excitement/adrenaline I felt while performing. This was disappointing, because that feeling of the highwire act, of being on the threshold of disaster, is what I have always loved about live performance – it's what is lacking in a film, video, or other cut-together asynchronous medium. That taut line between an audience and a performer, and the wide band of expression and exchange that line affords between the two, is so rare and transformative. It makes you find places in yourself, capabilities you did not know to unlock, or how. And even rarer are those triumphant moments where you feel you did a good job in this situation – a live-success where you became something wholly different, and effective and beautiful instrument of space / in time.
In this performance, I felt like we had no chance of succeeding (where success here is the faithful execution of a choreographer's vision). It was more like an open practice, asking an audience to watch along as we tried to imitate the instructor's (quite lovely) moves. Which is fine! I did not expect transcendence from such a hasty and rough rehearsal process. For this reason it was not hard to perform in my underwear for strangers in New York – there was nothing at stake.
I was really interested, though, in how much I enjoyed being part of the procession of dancers to the performance venue – we took the subway in full costume from Prince Street to Cortland and then walked through the Oculus to get to the Battery Park site. Twenty mostly-underpantsed dancers wrapped in burlap and facepaint, dutifully scanning OMNY passes and waiting on the platform for the R.
This part of the evening felt the most alive, had the most potential for a transformative moment – an accidental audience, a crew with a mission and a theme, an open book of available interactions with the space. At various points, I tried out: acting deeply serious and stone-faced; acting like I recognized everyone who passed by us; acting exhausted and stressed, like I was in fintech; mimicking any children we passed by; telling people “I don't know those other guys” when they asked what we were doing / who we were.
The stark difference between the two modes of performance got me thinking about a sort of butoh/clown dichotomy. In our butoh performance it was possible, even important, to ignore the audience. And in butoh in general, the practice is (to me, so far, still a beginner!) deeply internal and personal – you are listening as hard as you can to your body and its interface with the space and air around it. In moments of flow-state, you don't quite leave your body but you definitely reconfigure normal parameters/limits of time and exertion in favor of another logic innate to the practice itself. It can be done beautifully in an empty room.
In clowning (again, even less than a beginner here!) the audience is the medium – clowning in an empty room is a one-person trust-fall. High-theory clowning can have rigid strictures about keeping mute and only miming, about costume and pacing and internal motivation/character, but it's still fundamentally about playing a set of rules off an audience. A successful performance has an unambiguous, immediate, irrepressible audience response and can take as long or as short as the performer desires.
The procession to the venue was clownplay; the dance itself was dead.
What would a butoh clown look like? I imagine a slow-motion pratfall, the unfolding of a body-joke over an impressively languorous timeframe, an exchange with an audience member that holds focus for minutes, not seconds; a way to take the sort of sublime motion-mastery of the dance and imbue it with the quick wit and deep character integrity of the buffoon.