UNDERSTANDING BUTOH "BECOMING OTHER" (SERIES) INFERTILITY

UNDERSTANDING BUTOH

"BECOMING OTHER"

(SERIES)

INFERTILITY

WRITTEN

ARA FIG

MMXXVI

Butoh-Fu

Narrative:

The Dry Fountain & the Hollow Cradle

(An exhaustive elemental score for the infertility body)

Phase I:

The Descent and Decay

(The Setting)

The body does not enter the space; the space enters the body.

Anchor at the precise threshold where the derelict farmhouse ceases to be architecture and becomes a living corpse. One foot remains outside on cracked earth that remembers rain only as rumor; the other foot sinks into the interior where tatami mats have long since surrendered their weave. The mats are no longer soft; they are desiccated bone-plates that grind under the sole with a sound like distant teeth.

Peeling translucent shoji screens hang in the periphery of vision like flayed membranes. They do not move with wind; the wind itself has forgotten how to pass through them. Each screen is a failed lung. The light that leaks through is ashen, the color of milk left too long in a broken bowl.

At the center of this threshold stands the dry fountain: a moss-covered bamboo spring-tap. Its drip is not regular. It is intermittent, irregular, almost reluctant—*tink* … long silence … *tink*. Each drop falls into a stagnant stone basin already half-filled with stillness. The water does not sparkle. It is heavy, viscous with the weight of unrequited fertility. The basin is a womb that collects only the memory of moisture. The performer must feel this scarcity in the marrow: every joint is a stone basin; every sinew is moss that has forgotten how to drink.

Nearby, the Witness moves: a white molting rooster whose black crop is swollen and prominent, as though it carries an egg that will never be laid. It struts through the wreckage—shattered earthenware, broken eggshells (white and translucent, never once containing life), the shards of a tea cup and pitcher whose glaze has cracked into maps of drought. The rooster’s feathers catch the weak light and scatter it like ash. It does not crow. Its vigilance is sterile, restless, endless. The performer absorbs this vigilance into the peripheral nervous system: the body becomes partially rooster, partially ruin.

Phase II:

Internalizing the Object

(The Doll)

The arms do not reach; they curve inward from the shoulder blades as if the ribcage itself has begun to collapse around an absence. The enclosure is tight, protective, and entirely empty—yet within it is clutched the old Japanese baby doll.

The doll is not plastic. It is a dense amalgam of lead and ash, cold to the imaginary touch, heavier than any living infant. Its painted surface is crazed with age; flakes of cheek-paint are missing, revealing a dull porcelain that has never known the warmth of blood. The cloth wrapper is stained with the brown of old tea and the gray of dust. This is the ghost of a lineage that terminated before it began.

Every muscle of the upper back, the trapezius, the rhomboids, the deep stabilizers of the scapulae, must register the impossible gravity of the unrealized child. The weight pulls the sternum downward and inward. The clavicles threaten to snap under the pressure of what was never held. The performer does not “carry” the doll; the doll colonizes the chest cavity and begins to hollow it from within.

The gaze is wide, unfocused, fixed on a point beyond the far wall of the farmhouse, beyond the audience, beyond the present moment. The eyes do not see; they are open wounds that refuse to close. Around the mouth and the outer corners of the eyes the white body paint has begun to crack into micro-fissures.

These fissures are not decorative. They are the visible evidence of the tension between the body’s desperate attempt to preserve a rigid outer shell and the absolute internal collapse that has already occurred. The paint flakes when the jaw tightens or when the breath catches. Let the flakes fall.

Phase III:

Choreographic Directions

(The Butoh-Fu Script)

“Become the paper wall that has forgotten how to block the wind.

Become the eggshell that cracked before the yolk could quicken.

Become the drop that hangs forever at the tip of the bamboo and never falls—until it does.”

Action 1:

The Internal Contraction

Draw the breath not into the lungs but downward, past the diaphragm, into the pelvic bowl (*koshi*). Feel the lower abdomen gather itself into a knot of cold iron. The uterus (whether present or absent in the physical body) becomes a clenched fist of iron filings.

The spine begins a slow, irreversible compression: each vertebra settling closer to the one below it, the entire column curving forward in a protective arc around the lead-and-ash doll.

The posture is that of an ancient tree struck by lightning years ago—hollowed, blackened at the core, yet still standing. The knees soften almost imperceptibly; the weight drops into the soles as if the earth itself is pulling the body downward into its own dryness.

Hold this contraction until the iron knot begins to radiate cold into the thighs and the lower back.

Action 2:

The Tremor of the White Surface

The arms remain locked in their protective curve, but the fingers—painted a stark, corpse-white—begin to live a separate life. They tremble independently, not from cold or fear, but as roots searching through dry, compacted soil for a moisture that no longer exists. The tremor is fine, continuous, obsessive. The fingertips trace the weathered seams of the doll’s cloth wrapper in slow, repetitive circles—clockwise, then counter-clockwise, then clockwise again. Each circle is smaller than the last. The fingers never find an opening. They never find wetness. The white paint on the knuckles begins to crack under the micro-movement. Let the cracks widen. The rest of the body remains in the iron contraction; only the fingers search, endlessly, fruitlessly.

Action 3:

The Stasis and the Drop

Freeze. Completely. For ten full counts.

The entire body becomes the suspended drop at the tip of the bamboo pipe—perfectly still, perfectly heavy, perfectly temporary. The tremor in the fingers ceases. The breath is held in the pelvic iron. The eyes remain wide and unfocused. The white paint continues its slow fissuring in silence.

On the imaginary tenth count the drop falls.

Release a single, sharp, dry exhale—more a collapse of the ribcage than a breath. The exhale travels upward through the throat and out, disturbing the disheveled black hair so that individual strands lift, then settle, clinging to the damp (or imagined-damp) white paint on the cheek and the corner of the mouth. The hair becomes another kind of root, another failed search for moisture.

After the exhale the body does not return to readiness. It remains slightly more collapsed than before, the iron knot in the pelvis one degree tighter, the doll one degree heavier, the paper-wall body one degree more permeable to a wind that never comes.

Additional Elemental Layers

(to be woven throughout)

Soundscape of the body:

The intermittent *tink* of the bamboo is answered only by the dry scrape of tatami underfoot, the soft rattle of molting feathers, and the almost inaudible cracking of white paint.

Temperature:

The space is neither hot nor cold; it is the temperature of forgotten things. The performer’s skin must feel as if it is slowly losing the memory of warmth.

Time:

Time does not progress. It pools in the stone basin and evaporates without ever having moved.

Exit condition:

There is none. The score ends when the body can no longer distinguish between the weight of the doll and the weight of its own absence. At that moment the performer may remain, or may allow the paper wall to finally tear, or may simply continue the tremor of the white fingers into whatever comes next.