A pathway from clown to butoh dance
Japan, 1960s. Hijikata Tatsumi blows his contemporaneous’ minds and bodies preaching the dissolution of the dancer’s identity as the only Way to learn to transform the self in anything.
The loss of the ego is also the ideal vertex of yoga: ultimately, the search of a Force beyond the will leading us through unexpected directions.
The skill of the actor to become the character put on stage is the aim of the great theatre pedagogues’ didactics, in the Twentieth Century(Stanislavsky, Grotowsky, Barba, Lecoq, Artaud).
How can we develop the possibility to let go of the catch we keep on what we consider ourselves? Ceasing to identify what we are with the container and finding, finally, our essence in the water, able to flow into anything, without judgement.
This intensive residential workshop seeks a synthesis of methodologies posed between the East and the West: yoga, Noguchi taiso, acrobatic, clown pedagogy, Argentinean tango, enquiring in body, weight and breathing the different aspects of what we call theatre, improvisation, form.
“In order to be free from oneself, from the pitfalls of the creative act, from barbed fences of fear, one must undertake a journey in an unknown realm, a dimension where contradictions, time and multiplicity do not exist.
The boundaries of Whole and Self fall away. Language itself gives up its function to reveal the cause of its own existence, while answers and questions simply coincide. In this land roam strange life forms that are similar to man, but simultaneously his antithesis: Clowns. Grotesquely, these are humans to the infinite power, archetypes, perennial paradoxes, intangible stains of liquid, both the image and its background, androgynous masses of pure and palpating desire; poetic monsters of darkness and light, marvellous creatures, divine and demonic, brimming with dance and music, silence and stasis. Asymmetric consciousnesses.
The name of this place is Unconsciousness, and only those who learn to free themselves one day at a time are able to play with the powers that live there.
The only Freedom is freedom from ignorance itself.”
Alessandro Bortolozzi
Oxymoron is “A figure in which an epithet of a contrary signification is added to a word; e. g., cruel kindness; laborious idleness.” [1913 Webster]; it is the linguistic figure of the paradox.
Compagnia Oxymoron 