From Interiority to Form: Classical Dance as External Form— Butoh as Internal Substance

The aim of this reflection is to share how I relate contemporary dance and Butoh to the Cancer–Capricorn axis in astrology; where the more classical forms of dance (ballet, folklore, and contemporary) are related to form (Capricorn – Saturn), and Butoh to substance, interiority, and content (Cancer – Moon).

To do this, I’ll go back to the moment when I first became interested in Butoh dance.

In January 2025, I participated in the improvisation intensive with David Zambrano at Tic Tac Center—a full month of detailed and constant study in the art of improvisation on stage. Simultaneously, in the room next door, there was a Butoh intensive of the same length. I was doing an intensive of the same duration, but in what is called “Butoh Dance.” Butoh is a Japanese dance form that dates back to the postwar period and is inspired by trauma, resistance, and the need to express the indescribable through the body. Born in the 1950s in Japan as a radical response to the historical and cultural context of the time, Butoh rejects conventional forms of dance and proposes a deep exploration of interiority, transformation, and the grotesque.

Truly, comparing the energy of both rooms (and when we crossed paths at lunchtime), it felt as if we were working with completely opposite energies running in parallel; like Yin and Yang. The improvisation with David corresponded to the Yang: masculine, extroverted, active, while Butoh felt like the Yin: feminine, introverted, passive, receptive. These were completely different breeding grounds that culminated in diverse performative results—and in my case, a fractured radius.

It was at that moment, while I was injured from an excess of Yang energy (at the time I was not only dancing six hours a day and performing every weekend, but also working at the Tic Tac facilities), that I jokingly said, “Maybe I should try Butoh.”

Eight months later, when I had the chance to do so, I didn’t hesitate and embarked on an 18-hour seminar condensed into two days, facilitated by Sofya Shaikut.

Everything in the experience was new to me—diving into a world that felt like a niche within another niche, a world in which the question revolves around the state of being, rather than the state of doing. A world where I wondered whether I was dancing, acting, or simply embodying the characters emerging from Sofya’s watery imagination—or perhaps from characters hiding in the hidden folds of my own being.

Entering a dimension of dim lighting where space takes on a dense quality, time slows down, and one patiently invokes sensations that emerge and generate movement was something challenging, liberating, irritating, disorienting—perhaps too subtle for someone accustomed to grandiose physical gestures and movements that fill the entire space.

Along with around ten other participants, we immersed ourselves in a swampy and imaginative terrain, where time and space took on a completely new and unusual meaning.

I thought my experience would end with the workshop, but on the contrary, it left a certain echo in my consciousness and body, a resonance I’m still trying to process through words.

I write from the studio at Lake Studio, where I’m doing a residency whose sole purpose is to digest, give form to the content, and find my own way to embody what I’ve learned from different teachers throughout 2024. My research during these three weeks has focused on investigating and dissecting the formal aspects of dance—the production of form guided by anatomical planes or inspired by rhythms and melodies. I was interested in exploring the body as a vessel through which form and music take position and manifest in clear external forms.

What I experienced in the Butoh seminar brought something entirely different—and perhaps complementary—where dance is internal. The waves of movement occur within and take shape outwardly—from imagination, bubbling sensations, and impulses—producing subtle movement, characters, and postures, almost like the distant echo of a wave.

I experienced an internal substance, a dance, a groping character—that expresses itself very subtly on the outside, almost like a puppet moved by invisible strings pulled from remote corners of the soul.

In some way, this contrast—working from the interior to generate an exterior, or from the exterior (inevitably generating an interiority)—brought resonances with the Cancer–Capricorn, Saturn–Moon axis in astrology. Butoh embodies Cancer–Moon (in a process of almost autistic interiority), while dances that focus more on form production align with the sign of Capricorn and Saturn.

I’ve heard both interpretations: that Cancer is the sign of incarnation, and that Saturn (Capricorn) is. “Souls incarnate in Cancer…”—it is the entry of energy into form—the passage from something more abstract like the pure energy of Aries, the materialization of that energy in Taurus, and the play of different combinations in Gemini, to the village/humanity, to a form that excludes “foreign” information in order to make a nest and allow something to grow. Cancer is the sensation that there is an “inside” and an “outside”; there, interiority is created, psyche appears, and an inner world arises. Energy concentrates on internal processes and this perception (very human) begins to appear: “I am an interiority attending to an external world…”

Meanwhile, Capricorn is a “dimensional passage” in which what matters is no longer the concrete, but the underlying framework behind the concrete. This framework can manifest in different ways depending on the level of Capricorn involved: physical, social, mental, structural, or essential. In this sense, Capricorn has a very peculiar intensity: the intensity of being connected with what is most essential, most distilled, which ends up being the most austere and simple—because it is what lies at the depth of everything that exists.

From this relationship, I wonder: what would it be like to apply both forms of “production” in an improvised dance? Would the passage from the internal to the external become visible? Would it be manifestable? And more importantly, what is the link between one state and the other? Can one simply transform, become another state from one moment to the next? Is structure the body that holds us, and substance the soul? Is Butoh a dance of the soul, transforming and taking on different forms? What happens when Cancer (interiority, emotion, nest) dances within the architecture of Capricorn (structure, form, containment)? Is it possible for a body to express both?

I think I would need another full month of residency to research on this subject.