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Butoh Box
A Spectators Account
2/21/04
... i know now that i am going to do butoh again someday... and i am going to kick ass because i'm insane and i'll bleed for it.
  
…i saw reverend billy, which is not an accident because reverend billy saved my soul ... made me see that i have to put what i'm doing in a context, made me believe in peace and art again, ... and he made me see that you can do what you want ...  he doesn't want to be pinned down or give straight answers about what he is doing, but it was all there. politics, religion, spirits of the dead - the emotional connection that transforms everything from emptiness into god ...
  
…and i found out that night about butoh and all week i've been waiting for it. and i got it... and it was as real as real gets, and these are my disjointed notes because some day i will sweat and bleed to write a piece that will give the sense of what i sensed tonight ... the sense of it of course, because the actual thing is beyond words ...
oh, there was one moment, one moment above all .. there were many highs and lows, and a million little moments, and maybe a million moments that were more intense but there was one moment when it all came together ...

thirty people in an abandoned storefront on division avenue ... and the three Fates are in the window, dancing, and there's an army of homeless people outside, screaming at each other, falling endlessly into death on the pavement, and inside half a dozen models primping and preening and four butoh dancers in black writhing in the window like angels or demons and it's loud and i'm standing next to bliss talking about how we just called the fucking cops. i still have the adrenaline flowing from the street hassles and the violence (all that masculinity, shall we say?) there was an installation on the floor made of brown and white sand and one of the bums walked right through it and i grabbed him by the arm and yanked him out of it ...

and it's all like they planned, you know? this is exactly why they wanted to do butoh in a store window, to make this space where the two worlds come together so close ... male and female inside outside complete fucking chaos. complete. there was nothing holding it back. homeless people have weapons you know.
and agent RACHEL climbing up the pipe like a stripper's pole, like my scene from spanish castle magic, rising over the heads of the crowd in the corner, up by the ceiling ...

that was the thing, her hanging there by the ceiling, me standing next to bliss, literally a dozen screaming, shouting, leering destitute street people outside the window, thirty more pretentious artsy types inside, models strutting around like $2000 whores, and a god damn army of photographers and filmmakers and flashbulbs going off like little orgasms everywhere. not to mention cops and the bag lady who got bashed in the face with a bottle so the ambulance came. and it could have gone off at any minute. all held together by a pane of glass.

this was, without a doubt in my mind, the most real thing ever to happen in the universe. i am not exaggerating. that was reality, there in that room, and all you five billion-plus people who weren't there will just have to suffer for its loss.

that's it. that was the apocalypse right there. i came home, wandered around the streets of grand rapids drunk off my ass for two hours, wrote an entire novel in my head. a million things to say about it but nothing to say. tonight at the free radical gallery on the corner of weston and divison the most real thing ever to happen in the universe happened. it just did. and it was indefinable and huge and strangely anticlimactic. i thought the most real thing ever to happen in the universe would be all bloody and violent or something, but instead it was chaos and inversion. pure chaos. grand rapids, michigan, is the center of the universe now.

years ago, i concluded that butoh was the ultimate art form, but i forgot because i had to leave the group. and even when i was in the group, i felt like i was just exploring a side-avenue in my larger spiritual quest. but now my larger spiritual quest has come to a successful end, and the return trip has led me back to butoh. and there is no doubt in my mind now that i am a butoh dancer. that whatever else i do in my life, this is one of the things that is going to happen. everything that is important or meaningful in the world is contained in the experience of butoh (whatever particular form that experience may take).

this is the raw power of the emotional connection.
all the world is nothing but the dance of darkness ...

there's this one asshole who's sitting front row center for two fucking hours, leering and treating the whole thing like a strip show. this is his fantasy, he tells me. making little moans and "ohhh's" under his breath every time the dancers bend over. whenever another male comes by he starts talking shit, wanting to share the fun ... we're buddies, see, we're guys. come on guys, it's a party. i tell him to mellow out, but he's a ringleader. he needs other men around. every fucking one of his pals walks by in the street he waves them in. every one who joins him makes him louder, stronger.  it gets harder and harder to control him. by the time i got fed up, he's got five of them in there. we've told them to shut up but they're getting louder. one says "shhh!" so loud the whole room can hear it and ringleader shouts "don't you tell me to shut up!" they own the room now.

it was unbelievable. at least one of them was incoherent. just not all there. he was staring off into space, beating his hands on his arms, making loud slapping sounds and not even realizing where he was. either that or he was trying to cause a scene, see how much he could get away with. or both. another one was just taking all the food.

i honestly felt it was turning the whole performance into a joke. who are these fucking idiots who left one girl in her twenties (a nice one, who would never kill anyone) to manage an event like this on the corner of weston and divison on saturday night? by late evening there were fucking dozen street people out there, ranting at each other. with this one ringleader inside inviting them in, the whole place could have gotten out of control in a minute. thirty fucking seconds. because they argued with the cops, man. no way they were going to even listen to anyone less than a cop. and it took the cops ten minutes to get them outside. and that was in the early evening before all the young, out-and-out psycho ones showed up.

nine out of ten of them are just talking shit. but it's that one who has a fucking knife and something to prove that causes trouble, you know? and the thing is, when the fashion models showed up the place was packed with people. packed with fucking people and if those assholes had still been in there, there would have been a problem. i know it.

in fact, i was outside on the pavement, listening, and there was another ringleader talking all kinds of shit i can't even remember. he was pissed off and resentful of the audience. he was getting people stirred up. a few minutes later he was inside. then another followed him, and another.

i don't know, i've been fucking wired all night about this. i can just imagine, if we hadn't gotten those four freaks out of the audience before the other dozen showed up, what could have happened. they were standing out on the god damn street corner yelling at the top of their lungs. there were at least two different shouting matches going on. and the first ringleader was a fucking psycho. explosive temper. after the cops kicked him out he stood in a doorway across the street yelling at us. suddenly he threw himself flat on the ground and started screaming "there! arrest me!" just dropped like a fucking rock. fell from a standing position flat on his side, which doesn't sound scary, but is much different to see. and when someone throws their body around like that, without any regard for it, you know they aren't going to have much regard for anyone else's. people like that can go off if you challenge them at all. and they are totally used to being thrown out of places so they don't go easy.

no, there was going to be yelling, at least. there was going to be big ugliness. the reason they were there on was because they're heard of what was going on from the few who were there the night before. they were there for the show, and if Ringleader had been inside, inviting them in, if they'd felt free to come in and out as they pleased, it would have been ugly. at least i think so.

i'm thinking now, what's the line between confrontational art and stupidity?


 

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