BUTOH DANCE
Some classify it as an intermediate step between dance and theatre. Tatsumi Hijikata, the founder of this dance, thought that his art had the purpose of recovering the original body, “the body that has been stolen from us”.
Butoh Dance was created by Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Onho in 1950. Shaken by the fateful atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, these artists began the search for a new body, the post-war body. It was common in this context to see survivors of the bombings on the streets, walking with their bodies burned and with their eyeballs burst and hanging over their cheeks.
Shocking images that created in the artists the need to find a new language that could express the sensation of death in life, of an uncomfortable body that struggles towards a utopian post-traumatic equilibrium.
With Butoh dance, life and death appeared together, in dialogue through the dancer's body, which gives life to universal images that make us travel towards the mysterious condition of our human existence.
ORACLES Theatre / Studio was born by taking a step into the unknown, with the artistic union of the eastern roots of Butoh dance and the western universe of the collective unconscious. Over time, the Butoh dance has become one of the fundamental pillars of the school and the ORACLES production company, leading us to investigate traditional themes of western culture and the universal anthropological repertoire present in myths, stories and legends.
From this fusion and constant research, the Onyric Theatre and ORACLES Theatre / Studio space were born. Its creator, Orland Verdú, travelled directly to Japan to learn this revolutionary language and transfer it to the western roots, to the art of tragedy that Friedrich Nietzsche already studied in his treatise The Birth of Tragedy, where the essence of butoh dance beats in our western root.
Butoh Dance was created by Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Onho in 1950. Shaken by the fateful atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, these artists began the search for a new body, the post-war body. It was common in this context to see survivors of the bombings on the streets, walking with their bodies burned and with their eyeballs burst and hanging over their cheeks.
Shocking images that created in the artists the need to find a new language that could express the sensation of death in life, of an uncomfortable body that struggles towards a utopian post-traumatic equilibrium.
With Butoh dance, life and death appeared together, in dialogue through the dancer's body, which gives life to universal images that make us travel towards the mysterious condition of our human existence.
ORACLES Theatre / Studio was born by taking a step into the unknown, with the artistic union of the eastern roots of Butoh dance and the western universe of the collective unconscious. Over time, the Butoh dance has become one of the fundamental pillars of the school and the ORACLES production company, leading us to investigate traditional themes of western culture and the universal anthropological repertoire present in myths, stories and legends.
From this fusion and constant research, the Onyric Theatre and ORACLES Theatre / Studio space were born. Its creator, Orland Verdú, travelled directly to Japan to learn this revolutionary language and transfer it to the western roots, to the art of tragedy that Friedrich Nietzsche already studied in his treatise The Birth of Tragedy, where the essence of butoh dance beats in our western root.