Director: Anushka Meenakshi, Iswar Srikumar; Cinematographer: Anushka Meenakshi, Iswar Srikumar
Duration: 00:13:19; Aspect Ratio: 1.778:1; Hue: 71.559; Saturation: 0.076; Lightness: 0.462; Volume: 0.051; Cuts per Minute: 0.375
Summary: The
Subbody Butoh School is just a short walk outside of Mc Leod Ganj. Rhizome Lee,
the teacher at the school, runs a one year course that is open to anyone
interested in learning Butoh. Butoh is a form of dance that emerged in Japan
after World War II. Our earlier experiences of Butoh had come from watching two
other performers - Min Tanaka and Atsoushi Takenouchi, both extraordinarily
riveting and moving. So when we saw a notice announcing a weekly open
performance by the students of the school, we were happy to get a chance to
visit them and spend an afternoon there.
The school
is located in a pretty idyllic setting, with a largish amphitheatre where you
can watch performances against the backdrop of Himalayan snow peaks. The
students who we saw at the performance were all foreigners and had mostly been
training for just 6 weeks, though some of them were returning for the second
time.
We
were stunned by some of the visuals and the overall performance. While chatting
with students post the show we hit it off with one of them, Honza, who had
taken to Butoh quite late in his life, and decided to speak to him at greater
length. Honza is a visual artist whose eyes get deceptively spaced out when he
performs. But meet him outside of the Butoh space and there is a whole range of
mischief, warmth and curiosity in them. He also has an obvious knack for
picking out and making striking costumes for himself. This wasn’t his first
encounter with Butoh, as he reveals in his interview. He believes that the form
must be taken to people especially to those who don’t have a clue about it.
Rhizome
Lee, who runs the Subbody Butoh School, doesn’t like to be called a teacher or
a master. He says he is a midwife, only facilitating the creation of something.
Originally from Japan, Lee has now lived in McLeod Ganj for several years, and
spends his time being a midwife to dozens of students who come from all over
the world to take the course that he offers. Speaking to Lee set off a whole
bunch of questions in our own heads about what we were doing. We had gone to
him with a set of questions, each of which he turned on its head. We asked him about “performing”
Butoh. But then Butoh was not performance to him at all. We asked him about
emotions. He said that he was not even looking at human responses in what he
did, but animal ones, so the question of emotion didn’t exist. Listening to Lee’s take on life and performance began to change the way we looked at the things we were filming and probably kept our minds open to what we were going
to encounter a couple of weeks later in Spiti.
Himachal Pradesh/April 23 Mcleod Ganj/Butoh/Butoh performance/Sony/68.MTS
Performance at Subbody Butoh School
Mcleod Ganj, Himachal Pradesh
Himachal Pradesh/April 23 Mcleod Ganj/Butoh/Butoh performance/Sony/69.MTS
Performance at Subbody Butoh School
Himachal Pradesh/April 23 Mcleod Ganj/Butoh/Butoh performance/Sony/70.MTS
Performance at Subbody Butoh School
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