Towards an ecology of the soul
From Catholic Christmas to Buddhist New Year

During many years I had been considering the idea of making a dance out of "The Androgyne" . This meant to find in dance the combination of male and female, the delicate and soft aspect along with the strong and penetrating one, a sort of a silent ceremony full of secret symbols that are common to everybody. Fear, anger, pain, joy, compassion and love are also common to us all. One feeling unchains the other and so on.

The difficulty in dance like in life, lies on the possibility to flow and pass through these feelings without stopping or getting stuck in any of them.

Each element of nature (tree, flower, fish, insect, stone, mountain, sky, etc.) feels and experiences the same process as the human being.

In a world where words are mere noises charged with "smog" as Fellini stated in his last film "Let's make a little bit of silence", perhaps from there we will listen to the soul that is shouting words, sounds of love and pain, like when a new-born cries out something we cannot understand.

To tune our own feelings (as Kazuo Ohno taught me) is to return to the "origin of life" in order to express an ideal and unreal world which is impossible to achieve by our own will. It can only be made through an observation of nature and the faith I may have to give a form to my body, in an intermediate world (a world where neither light nor darkness are absolute).

It is a world where "God is musculature" as Yoshito Ohno says. It is a time and space where Ankoku Butoh "The dance of darkness" is represented.

Gustavo Collini Sartor