Review: KOKORO Enlightens at Wreck Beach

Butoh is a sacred modern art. Originally spawned of postwar Japan, Butoh has since invigorated the world to a new style of movement. Kokoro dances Butoh in the nude. From the lower mainland of British Columbia to the world, this Dancing on the Edge Festival surely lives up to its name.

The Butoh style of dance is, in effect, a radical form of knowledge, or way of knowing the world from the edges of human consciousness. A dancer is a visionary storyteller, the prime mover of animate life, and the voice of the body. Dance, or simply conscious movement, sets an ontological tone in an environment.

Like a traveler falling through a cascade of mirrored reflections, the dancer takes the first step onto the ground of being. As such, Kokoro Dance performed their annual, hour-long celebration of Butoh at the famously clothing-optional Wreck Beach.

Balancing over sand and stone, driftwood and puddles, Kokoro's Butoh dancers stretched their nude bodies beneath the reverent glamor of midday sun. As a small audience gathered, the horizon shone with faint stretches of verdant mountains saddled up lush against the Pacific shoreline. Many wore only a hat or backpack, standing amid felled cedars under the sheer solar brilliance intensified by pale ultramarine.

The waves lapped, as over twenty ashen bodies began eviscerating the human form with all of the awkward satire, uncomfortable tension true to the art. Butoh is sacred because it reveals the spirituality of the human experience. It expresses the estrangement of the spirit of consciousness from the body.

Much of human life is defined by this inner conflict of wonder: Why am I this? Butoh glorifies, elaborates, and dramatizes the experience of asking this question.

Tonguing, retching, and grasping into the empty air for a semblance of meaning, to get even the slightest closure on the mysteries of being, the sand-rasped, exposed skin of the dancers embodied the tragic beauty, the lonely insanity of human life on Earth.

They acted out the movements of birds, and beasts, waded out to sea, and returned to land with choreographic ceremony, every movement a symbol of ecstatic yearning and lost wondering. A devoted, small crowd of onlookers was enticed by the ethereal beauty of the naked mass of human flesh, open, vulnerable, grotesque, and stunning.

It was a curious sight. The dancers displayed an archetypal form, in unison, of the essential collective act of dancing, inspired by an idea, a feeling, a belief, a question, a truth. Wild and primordial free spirits met with the vicarious character of history, that ubiquitous spectator, the objectifying audience of intellectual bifurcation: the public.

Yet, in this performance, it was not the audience that seemed normal, as they ambled quaintly along the beach, staring at the unfixed performance, sometimes moving toward the grouped nudes, sometimes evading their collective swaying.

And the dancers enacted this truth effusively as they broke form and were possessed by a sardonic laughter before individual spectators of their respective choosing. Their roving eyes locked with the indifferent and the zealous alike, and laughed brazenly in their faces.

Kokoro Dance has revolutionized choreographic art in this respect, calling forth the most authentic cravings of eternal movement as held deep within the heart of all. After all is said and done, the human being is nothing more than an imagined flicker, an instantaneous reflection in a waving world of mystery and charm.

Photo credit: Yukiko Onley

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