WADING

Spring of a Dancer  is a film, a book, a poem, a theatrical performance, a podcast, and a philosophical lecture on dance. Wondering  what is the point of dancing today  is one of the questions that has been close to my heart since I first became involved in dance. Butoh dance invites us to the scandal of the flesh, because it rebels against the rules and norms that claim to tell us what movement i...

"All things were born from a single fire" say the fragments of the Chaldean Oracles. In fact, without the splendour of the dance of the Sun , not only would there be no light for our planet, but the solar system could not even have formed. The Sun is at the centre of our experience of the rhythm of existence. It distinguishes day from night, brings the fruits of the earth to maturity, controls the...

Wondering what’s the point of dancing today is one of the questions that has been close to my heart since I started to get involved in dance. Just as butoh dance invites us to desecrate conventions and explore the areas that question the boundaries between masculine and feminine, life and death, grace and vulgarity; so philosophical thought invites us to question our beliefs, preparing us to enjoy...

The line between what is alive and what is dead is not so clear. Going through the pain of grief, I have learned that every ending is already a new beginning. None of us wants to grieve, certainly. Life can be difficult. Yet in the midst of the storm, we may surprise ourselves, turning our gaze beyond our skin frame. Like the fatigue of buds, during winter, we can let a new dance bloom when spring...

When we look death in the face we learn a little more about living . This is what grief has taught me, but not only that. Butoh dance has repeatedly allowed me to dance in the face of death. Indeed, as Hijikata Tatsumi says, the body of a butoh dancer is like a corpse desperately holding on. With our dance, which is life and death together, Ohno Kazuo teaches, we must be grateful for all those dea...

To achieve enlightenment , shamans teach, one must first bury oneself in the cave. In fact, they say, to open our gaze, we must close our eyes in the darkness of the earth. The shaman , like the butoh dancer , lives straddling the world of the living and the world of the dead, sometimes exchanging favor and sometimes hostility with spirits. Like alchemists , shamans challenge the boundaries betwee...

Dancing taught me that none of us live merely under our own skin . John Dewey, an American philosopher of the 20th century, said that our organs, in fact, are made to connect with what goes beyond our skin. This is why I teach dance. With my FÜYA method I invite my students to reflect on the meaning of dance and on the fact that dance actually allows us to experience our inner world, therefore dan...

WADING invites listeners to walk through the metaphorical river that separates worlds, much like the mythic crossings guided by Charon in ancient lore. This podcast is a journey into that very process of transcending what is immediately present. Through the expressive power of butoh dance — a performance art form that delves deep into the human spirit of ritual rebellion — and the philosophical in...