New Prints by Becky Clawson

On View: July 8, 2016 – October 1, 2016
Friday, July 8, 2016 from 6:30 pm – 9:00 pm

The Body Will Speak: Impressions of Butoh is a visual journal of Highpoint cooperative artist Becky Clawson’s experiences during her first year as a student of Butoh, an avant-garde dance form developed in the late 1950s in Japan. Butoh (the “Dance of Darkness”) is not based on a set vocabulary of movement as many other dance forms are. Instead, it seeks to strip away the cultural conventions and expectations that habitually shape identity – and by extension the body and its movements – so that a more fundamental and organic expression might emerge. From an audience’s viewpoint, the resulting movements often appear enigmatic or even at times grotesque. But The Body Will Speak is more concerned with the internal experience of how it feels to dance Butoh, rather than in any particular gestures that result. Mirroring the way Butoh dismantles conventional identity, six identical lithographic images have been dismantled and reimagined in layered, mixed media collages. The resulting pieces are a glimpse into the experience of Butoh from the perspective of a fledgling dancer in motion.