Bowels of the Earth is a meditation on the human body’s connection to decomposition.  My choreography takes its inspiration from a text by the founder of Butoh Tatsumi Hijikata known as "Kaze Daruma" (Wind Daruma).  Originally titled “Suijakutai no saishū” (Collection of Emaciated Body), this text was delivered as a lecture by Hijikata the night before the 1985 Tokyo Butoh Festival.  In this lecture, Hijikata emphasized the body’s somatic intimacy with mud and soil and portrayed Butoh as a unique type of performed ecological knowledge that disrupts Western ideologies of delineated corporeality and their preconditioned behaviors. 

Also, in his lecture, Hijikata touches on the theme of what he termed "suijakutai" (the emaciated body), and how the performance of this ‘emaciated body’ in Butoh excavates the relationship between life and death.

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Indeed, from its inception, the theme of death has been recurring, if not instrumental, in Butoh.  As the founder and chief architect of Butoh, Hijikata is quoted as saying such things as, “Butoh is a corpse standing upright in a desperate bid for life” and “we shake hands with the dead, who send us encouragement from beyond our body; this is the unlimited power of Butoh.”

Decomposition is what happens to the human body after death: we return to the soil, and become a part of the subterranean earth.  Decomposition is also the force of nature that radically transforms the dying human self into new life.  How can choreographies of decomposition in performance act as a kind of ecological methodology, reminding us that we are not separate from nature and the environment nor from the decaying aspects of life in which all beings, bodies, and entities are entangled?

In its descent toward the mud and sod of the earth, Butoh invites us to directly commune with death and decomposition.

In the words of Hijikata, 'the dancer, through the Butoh spirit, confronts the origins of his fears: a dance which crawls towards the bowels of the earth.'

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Duration: 35 minutes

Choreography: Iván-Daniel Espinosa

Dance: Harlan Rosen, Corin Wiggins, Stefan Bach, Arlo Sage King,  Iván-Daniel Espinosa

Commissioned soundscape composed by:  Christopher Arnett

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