Butoh Research Project - Country, Sertanejo and Caipira Corpses that dance syncretism and popular memories.
In the shadows of this body, the litanies of the saints' festivals resound, the echo of the drums, the murmur of the prayers interrupted by the creaking of the canoes. His skin retains the touch of healers, his bare feet follow the rhythm of the promises paid with candles and ribbons. He carries the weight of invisible ex-votos, of memories dissolved in time.Concept
This research proposes a reterritorialization of butoh based on the symbolic and affective landscapes of the Brazilian countryside, especially the regions bathed by the Paraíba do Sul and Paraitinga rivers. By conceiving a "country butoh", we explore the possibility of a body that is inscribed not only in space, but in collective memory, in religious syncretism and in the cosmogony of land and water.
Butoh, as a body language originating in post-war Japan, is marked by a deep listening to time, death, decomposition and presence. When transplanted to the depths of Brazil — where the country folk, the riverside dwellers and the backlands coexist with hybrid and ancestral religious practices —, butoh acquires its own contours. This dancing country body approaches the land not only as an aesthetic or metaphorical element, but as an ontological substrate of existence. Here, the ground is territory, food, sacred and also a threat, especially in the face of the recurrent flooding of the rivers.
The Paraíba and Paraitinga rivers are not just geographical references, but living entities that organize the social, economic and ritual time of these communities. The dance we propose is traversed by these waters — by the wait for rain, by the floods that force the movement of bodies, by the mud that sticks to the skin and to memory. The body on stage becomes a "river-body", subject to variations in the flow, to interruptions in the course, to the invisible forces that move the waters and emotions.
In this context, religious syncretism plays a central role. The overlapping of popular Catholic practices — such as Corpus Christi, with its carpets made of colored sawdust — with rituals of African and indigenous origin, such as congada and jongo, reveals a fluid, rooted and resilient spirituality. The body that dances caipira butoh is, therefore, a body permeated by multiple symbolic systems, which incorporates black and indigenous ancestry, while simultaneously dialoguing with rural Christian images — clay saints, promises, litanies, pilgrimages.
It is a body that dances with the earth and for the earth — a body that does not seek only representation, but incorporation. Listening to the slow tempo of nature, the rhythmic repetition of ritual gestures and the collective trance of popular festivals converge into a performative practice in which dance is simultaneously an artistic gesture, liturgy and survival.
The research therefore proposes an unfolding of butoh as a tool for excavating memory and territory, stretching the boundaries between tradition and experimentation, between the sacred and the performative, between the individual body and the collective body of culture.
Butoh Caipira - Video 1 - First Rehearsal
Cartographies of an essay
The gospel according to Matuto
In the beginning, the body was mycelium, a memory of nature that never forgets the smell of rain, a dung heap in wet earth. The hyphae spread to the ground and there they met, not as something
that prostrates itself, but as something that rediscovers the womb of the world. It was a dance
without beginning or end, a murmur that spread through the cracked skin, like earth that
welcomes fungus.
The body whispered to the wind that dance is the spirit that meets flesh; it is the invisible
becoming visible.” Thus, he sought his own resurrection in movement, like the peasant who
dances at dawn with a hoe in his hands, celebrating the cycle of life and death in the midst
of sowing.
And in slow movement, like someone stepping through time, he understood that the soul is not
a place of light, but a meeting of shadows. Butoh taught that the body carries within itself
the ghosts of memory and that the pain of the past is also fertile soil for flowering.
And he said: "Happy are those who dance the hardness of life as if they were dancing with the
firmament, for the music of the stars will echo in their bones, and the earth that eats their
entrails will teach them to sing with the voices of the dead — preserved in the yellowed
photographs hanging on the clay wall that silently watches over our grandmothers' living room."
Natureza
Sculpture made with self-irrigation techniques and applying knowledge of hyperadobe.