Personal

My first encounter with Butoh was in Basel Switzerland around 1993, when I met Pia Maria Vaucher who just returned from her trip to Japan. There she met Kazuo Ohno and other Butohdancers and immersed herself deeply into the art of Japanese Butohdance. She was organising  a workshop with Daisuke Yoshimoto in Basel which I attended.  By the end of the workshop we had a public group performance on the stairs of the teater in Basel. The public seemed very touched by what I did and asked me for how many years I have been dancing Butoh. From then I knew that this kind of dance was my thing.

But the very powerful effect and life changing transformation I experienced in 1998 when I took part  in a month-long workshop with Masaki Iwana in Normandy, France. The last week of this month we had to create a solo and it was a very difficult last week for me. I wanted to leave the workshop and had a heatet confrontation with my teacher because of this. I ended up staying and that decision changed and saved my  life.  Since then Butoh and also Masaki Iwana have become a very important part in my life. I was finally able to leave my toxic relationship behind by dedicating my life to Butoh. I found the way out of darkness into the light and to this day I m still dancing.

About

Listening and watching are among the most difficult things in life. They are the same. Both have to do with a reconnection to our original nature. The so-called civilised man is cutting himself off more and more from nature and relies only on the social body, which is full of information from other people, which he endlessly quotes. As a result, he is increasingly distancing himself from his primal nature and his primal trust, which can only unfold in devoted attentiveness and alertness in dialogue with nature. Society-orientated people have lost respect for nature and its creatures, as they blindly and deafly surrender to consumerism, which celebrates the decay of values and the end of the world.
Japanese Butoh dance is an attempt to reach our inner body, to return to our true nature, in which beauty resides and which resembles the reflecting light on the water.

The inner and outer body The inner body moves the outer body. The outer body acts as a shadow or extension of the inner body.

Inner body – soul body
Outer body – pain body

How can I get to the soul body and leave the pain body behind?

The pain body is the sum of biographical suffering that has condensed into a negative, quasi-autonomous energy field. It is limited in time and space and is linked to thinking, the mind and identifies itself with certain characteristics (appearance, professional status, membership of a nation or religious community). These characteristics are the raw material that the mind assembles into a compact ego. The stronger the ego is, the more difficult it is to dissolve the pain-body armour. Dissolution only occurs when a person breaks through their identification with the pain body. This breaking open of the socially conditioned pain body has the consequence that the person is automatically catapulted into higher spheres, into a sphere unlimited in time and space – access to the formless = soul body is only possible beyond thinking.
The soul body is the essence, the being, the unmanifest and formless, the level of ultimate reality, the true nature, the divine.

The more permeable the membrane of the inner body is to the outer body, the more radiant the soul appears from the inside to the outside.
The suffocation of the inner body by external armouring (clinging to the ego) works against the flow of the soul and manifests itself as a colourless and lacklustre appearance in the world.
The aim is to expose the inner body so that the soul can breathe freely in the light of its true nature.