I can’t say I totally understood the performance by Sankai Juku. I have never seen anything like it. When I was reading Rachel’s blog post about her time in Japan, I really liked how she talked about her first experience with a Japanese performance. She said it made her realize that she’d only been exposed to a very small scope of literature. It’s the same with performance art. We’re confused by Butoh, I think, because it is so different from Western traditions. It’s very different from Western dance. In Western dance traditions, the dancer entertains the audience with leaps and jumps- things the audience probably couldn’t do themselves. For the most part, the Butoh dancers didn’t use their bodies in any spectacular way, except when they moved very slowly and showed spectacular control. It’s a different kind of entertainment. I think we might also be confused because there is no solid narrative. In the West, dances tend to accompany a story. Ballets definitely have stories. We are more comfortable with a performance if the meaning is laid out for us. In Butoh, the dance seems to be symbolizing something much bigger. I have no clue what that is, but I was able to enjoy the performance more when I stopped searching for one clear meaning.