Luiza Jesus do Prado
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Butoh Caipira

Intro
/ 01 — 2023—

Research, performance & installation

Butoh Caipira

Butoh research · performance

Country, sertanejo and caipira corpses that dance syncretism and popular memories.

© 2023—

Litany

In the shadows of this body, the litanies of the saints' festivals resound, the echo of the drums, the murmur of the prayers interrupted by the creaking of the canoes. His skin retains the touch of healers, his bare feet follow the rhythm of the promises paid with candles and ribbons. He carries the weight of invisible ex-votos, of memories dissolved in time.

This research proposes a reterritorialization of butoh based on the symbolic and affective landscapes of the Brazilian countryside, especially the regions bathed by the Paraíba do Sul and Paraitinga rivers. By conceiving a “country butoh”, we explore the possibility of a body that is inscribed not only in space, but in collective memory, in religious syncretism and in the cosmogony of land and water.

Butoh, as a body language originating in post-war Japan, is marked by a deep listening to time, death, decomposition and presence. When transplanted to the depths of Brazil — where the country folk, the riverside dwellers and the backlands coexist with hybrid and ancestral religious practices — butoh acquires its own contours. Here, the ground is territory, food, sacred and also a threat, especially in the face of the recurrent flooding of the rivers.

Pachamama — herbarium
A vertical arrangement of moss, twigs, small leaves, and yellow and white flowers.
Close-up of a plant with various stems, leaves and small flowers with pink and purple hues.
Close-up of a plant with a red stem and green leaves, tangled roots and moss.
Moss and small green plants growing on bark, with a yellow flower.
Five leaves with a heart-shaped cutout in each, arranged from left to right.
A floral arrangement with flowers, moss and twigs against a white background.

Territory

The research therefore proposes an unfolding of butoh as a tool for excavating memory and territory, stretching the boundaries between tradition and experimentation, between the sacred and the performative, between the individual body and the collective body of culture.

Territory
A backyard with a circle of stones around a fire pit, stacked tires and makeshift benches.
A large fallen tree blocking a rural dirt path, surrounded by misty fog.
A person pushing a wheelbarrow filled with soil through a tropical garden at sunset.
A silhouette of two people moving soil with a shovel against a sunset sky.
A dirty hand with blackened fingernails holding up three fingers.

Installation

Cartografias

Domestic cartographies of ash, soot and burnt cloth: the room as an altar of what was consumed by fire and water. Objects of daily devotion — the basin, the oil lamp, the shovel — become the scenography of a body that excavates memory.

Cartografias
Installation of a kitchen fire scene with burnt fabric, soot and a bowl with a wooden spoon.
Corner of a white room with a mop in a metal basin and a pile of blankets on the floor.
A metal container with a clay bowl inside, ashes and a shovel leaning against it.
Burned and sooty crumpled papers and fabric on a floor next to a white wall.
A traditional oil lamp with a clay wick holder and white pebbles inside a metal basin.

Assentamento

An installation with grains and seeds arranged in circular patterns on a gallery floor.
Black powder arranged in a curved shape on a wooden floor against a white wall.
A pile of natural dark materials on the floor with hanging roots and a diagonal beam of light.

Video 1

First Rehearsal

Rehearsal stills
Butoh Caipira — first rehearsal, still.
Butoh Caipira — first rehearsal, still.
Butoh Caipira — first rehearsal, still.
Butoh Caipira — first rehearsal, still.
Butoh Caipira — first rehearsal, still.
Butoh Caipira — first rehearsal, still.
Butoh Caipira — first rehearsal, still.
Butoh Caipira — first rehearsal, still.
Butoh Caipira — first rehearsal, still.
Butoh Caipira — first rehearsal, still.
Butoh Caipira — first rehearsal, still.
Butoh Caipira — first rehearsal, still.
Butoh Caipira — first rehearsal, still.
Butoh Caipira — first rehearsal, still.
Butoh Caipira — first rehearsal, still.
Butoh Caipira — first rehearsal, still.

The research proposes an unfolding of butoh as a tool for excavating memory and territory, stretching the boundaries between tradition and experimentation, between the sacred and the performative, between the individual body and the collective body of culture.

Next projectTopographies of Violence