Letters to my mum
Butoh Dance Performance
Ianvs
In front of the touched dancer, having reached the limit of its sky, the Sun stopped. It stood before Janus, guardian of the beginning and the end: “Two steps lead us to the third. For every sunset, a dance burns!” In the middle of the Night, it awoke.
“Humanity in the night kindles a light to itself, dull in its gaze, and living is in contact with the dead, and awake is in contact with the sleeping” wrote Heraclitus. Dance kindles a light in the darkness of the everyday. Dance opens the door to the sacred, which through the presence of gesture rips through profane time with an intensity that can shatter the veils of appearances. We are more than we think we are. In fact, we are able to connect with a ray of the Sun that touches our cheek, to the point of declaiming poetry with the Moon. Yet normally we are caught up in the torpor of everyday life, as if we were asleep. Dance, then, comes to us like a dream, but with the pretence of waking us up. To ignite a light in the darkness, says Heraclitus, is to enter the path of awakening. Along this path, to wake up, it is necessary to illuminate the dance of contraries: wakefulness and sleep, day and night, life and death. This dance wants to open the doors of awakening, placing the artistic gesture in the street, in everyday life, but pointing to what lies beyond, pointing and projecting the whole body into the beyond.
Year
2024
Production
Producer: FÜYA
Performance, Texts, Photo and Editing: Damiano Fina
Nō Mask: Udaka Keiko
Make-up Artist: Mirco Ferrazzi
Location: Venice
Ianvs is a butō dance performance by Damiano Fina with a nō mask made by Kyoto artist Udaka Keiko. One of the masks portraying a young woman, Masukami‘s dishevelled locks betray her extraordinary psychological state: spirituality amplified to the brink of possession. This is a mask not so much simply mysterious as pulsing with the divine power swirling within. The depth and softness of the depressions determine all, and enable the actor to capture the mental state of a goddess or miko (shrine maiden) performing a kagura dance for the gods.
