Butoh Dance – Sensitive Dance 

regular class with Kea Tonetti

final performance with live music by Tivitavi

Every Thursday 19,30 – 22,30 in Milano, Spazio Continuum

“Let your spirit wear the cosmos, entering the kingdom of an original memory of the body.” (Kazuo Ohno)

“Butoh is the cadaver that rises again with the desperate desire to live.” (T. Hijikata)

“Butoh is a ceremony of origins. It was already being celebrated when human beings first appeared on this earth.

We conserve the memory, buried within our bodies.” (Maro)

Become aware of the wonder of our body, our sacred home, living it as one with mind, heart and spirit.  Dance can be a wonderful vehicle to nourish the present moment and the Presence, the state in which we are in contact with the Being and the life.  Allow the dance to emerge naturally, with your breath, dance touching the deep of human soul, nourish the Beauty of the present moment, letting forms become an expression of soul.

The body is a sensitive and marvellous unit, in which all the parts communicate harmoniously, containing time and space within its cells, written as archetypes of ancestral memories; our bones, the cosmos and matter dance in spirals, waves, the infinite, creating lines of intersection, our organs continually absorbing and expressing emotions.

Research the organic movements, coming  from the roots, the centre, the skeleton, the senses, the sensations, from inside,  explore the micro movement, which arises from the skeleton and sustains the dance; nourish the state in which you are moved, danced, letting  yourself go to the flow of energy, without doing, flowing and perceiving the wonder of living your body in motion.

Dance the transformation, embody and embrace the spirit/energy of everything: the various manifestations of nature, its cycles,  of  human being;  the inner landscapes, the art images, the poetry, the myths, awaken your ancient wild nature. Without judgment, you embrace the strength and the frailty, the angels and the demons, the darkness and the light.

In Butoh, theater, dance, voice, singing, come together not to tell but rather to evoke, the un manifest, the unspoken, the unconscious, the archetypes, to create a ritual. It is essential to give birth to a state of emptiness and return to the empty body of origins, awakening a natural body, free from social and cultural limitations, in a state in which you are moved and you become one thing with the action. When your breath deepens, your body and being are in contact with this vibrant emptiness, which permeates the creation, you are free to become everything, dancing the beauty and the mystery of every  life manifestation.

The birth of a dance can be a moment of  opening, where to feel that a big strength and love are released, to live the eroticism, the sensuality and the feelings of things, the catharsis, the transient nature of beauty and life. The dancer’s spirit vibrates within the body, in emotions and in thoughts, creating and offering its creation, traveling from the finite to the infinite, within the vastness of the Universe, always in the present moment and in the body.

Sensitive Dance® combined with various eastern and western practices will be proposed as preparatory training for Butoh.

Some elements:

• Release tensions, allowing movements to be born from sensations in the present moment.
• An organic movement, which respects the structures of the body and its nature.
• Awaken the energy, let yourself be moved and move it while dancing.
• The evolutionary milestones of the human being, from the suspended cell to the vertical being.
• Explore subtle movements that flow from the skeleton and from energy, which sustain the dance.
• Spirals, serpentines,  waves, and the infinite movement, within the body and in space.
• The breath of our joints, of our vertebrae, of our alignment.
• The rooting and the Hara, the peaceful place that unites the energy of the earth with that of the sky.
• Opening the breath and the perception of space and time,.
• Learning to orient and carry your own body in space.
• Walking and being, experiencing different qualities of the body and those of space in a different way.
• The Presence.
• Listening, perceiving, the conscious touch, and the body’s sensitive dialogue.
• Reawakening ones own antique and wild nature, dancing the beauty of Nature and of the elements, their cycles of life and death.
• The  metamorphosis and the slow movement.
• Dance the beauty of Nature and of the elements, their cycles of life and death; images of art, mythology, the Arcana, poems, inner landscapes; in relation to objects or materials.
• Creating a personal dance composition, a poetic act.

The course will conclude with a group performance.

The first lesson is offered as a free trial, 

and it is possible to participate in the entire course, or just a single lesson.

Open to everyone!

This training and experience are useful for both dramatic arts as well as for the growth of personal and human consciousness. It is indicated for anyone who wants to undertake a journey of awareness through the body: dancers, performers, actors, artists, therapists, educators, psychologists, and people in pursuing personal research. 

A background in dance is not required.  

Butoh Dance is born in the end of the ’50 in Japan, founded by Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata and developed  later into multiple currents and schools, founded by various dancers and performers, as a dance and avant-garde performative art form. In Butoh dance the body becomes an expression of the soul. Inspiring from a vision of existence in which everything or being is a manifestation of the divine, it draws from the ancient Japanese philosophy, animism, the traditional practices and at the same time from the various forms of contemporary western art and literature of the post-war period. We can say that Butoh dance unites the archaic with the contemporary, it’s without time.  A dance of transformation, of existence, a research of the primitive roots of dance,  full of irrational, sexual and expressive force; cathartic, ritual, mystical, visionary, imaginative, spiritual, allows the liberation of one’s personal dance, beyond form, letting them born from body and soul. Butoh later spread to the rest of the world, where it evolved in various forms and various approaches of  different dancers and performers.

Danza Sensibile® (Sensitive Dance), founded by Claude Coldy along with two French osteopaths, Jean Luis Dupuy and Marie Guyon, was created from the union of osteopathy and dance, a research of movement and its origins, which offers a re-examination of the marvellous evolutionary landmarks of the human being, from the suspended cell to the vertical being, from the aquatic life before birth to the terrestrial life. In Sensitive dance the touch of listening permits to receive the body messages and to awaken the micro-movements of the skeleton that sustain and nourish the dance, respecting the body structures. The practices in the nature are enriched by the strong presence of the elements, which awaken the senses and sensations, expand the breath, stimulate creativity, reunite us with the wonderful planet Earth.