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 comes. From these thoughts my new project was born: ⁠Spring of a Dancer⁠. I hope it catches you in a moment of inspiration.

I invite you to ⁠watch the trailer for my film Spring of a Dancer⁠ on YouTube and read my new book Spring of a Dancer on Amazon Books.

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 deaths that have allowed us to be here at this moment. The dance, then, is like a prayer to existence.

Every step of butoh is always held in the balance between life and death, breaking through walls, playing with the invisible.

Today I think the pain we face when we are faced with death is an initiation. Death is an experience that restores an essential connection with our ancestors. In the face of horror at what disappears we find ourselves having to answer the questions that humanity has always asked. Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?

In this episode I present you a reflection about dance as death education.

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 between mortal and immortal things. Guarding the laws that govern the motions of the heavens, they plunge into what most consider “the end” or, rather, “the limit”, to return hermetic messages.

The butoh dancer, for Hijikata Tatsumi, dances like a corpse desperately holding itself up, falling and rising again trespassing between worlds, defying the rules that separate the sacred from the obscene, as in ancient Greek tragedies.

That darkness it passes through is so dark as to be luminous. It takes a journey into the body’s possibilities of connecting in, out, and beyond its own skin frame. Like the ancient ascetics of death, it sees its skeleton glowing with a golden light.