The Dance

[indar]

A Butoh troop performed
at Northrup Auditorium
University of Minnesota campus
some time in the 1980s,

They wore little more
than rice powder on their bodies
a red flower blooming
from one ear contrasted with
the blackness of the deadly space
inside their stretched open mouths.

I was born in 1942,
read Hiroshima during high school,
a selection from TAB
the teen-age book club program.

I watched the Butoh dancers perform
sometime in the 1980s
on the Northrup Auditorium stage,
watched their bodies contort, shake, drop
and said, perhaps out loud:
here it is.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTHTPBp842g

[Matty11]

Fascinating dance Indar. And I can see the thread to the Hiroshima horror. The dance impacting, releasing, more than words on the page. Art that time travels.

best

Phil

[indar]

Thanks Phil,

I thought of titles such as "What Good is Art?" (rather unsubtle) but glad you read this as a way in which art operates. I love dance--it seems a nearly perfect art form to me. Perhaps in my next life-----