For last year’s performance of City/Escape, the members of Marianne Kim’s butoh-inspired dance workshop alternately crept and sprinted east down Randolph Street from the Chicago Cultural Center to Daley Bicentennial Plaza. Wearing red thrift-store costumes and white body paint and twisting themselves into contorted shapes, the dancers were accompanied by Kim, who carried a boom box. “One homeless guy danced with us,” says one of the performers, “while people were screaming from cars and wondering what we were doing.”
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“It’s a very visual dance form that’s intensely physical in a non-Western way,” explains Kim, a former member of Xsight! Performance Group and an MFA candidate at UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures. “Butoh is not looking for idealized shapes and perfection of form. It’s more interested in irregularity, and is constantly challenging what we’re perceiving of as beauty in dance and in life.”
Though some of the 11 dancers have formal training, others do not–their movements, Kim says, “can be more raw and oftentimes a little more honest.” Over the last several weeks the participants have done strength-training exercises and improv using the slow, awkward movements and strenuous–almost violent–bursts of activity that typify butoh. One workshop exercise that they’re trying to incorporate into this year’s piece, Fractal, involves starting from a standing position and then throwing themselves to the ground to jerkily move across the floor as though pulled by strings attached to various body parts. LeGette says it’s like figuring out how to “break down and rebuild the body.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Jim Newberry.
