November 20–24, 2023 — 9:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. (Monday to Friday)
Language of instruction: English / Open to artists from all disciplines
Montreal, a Monday morning in November. I push open the creaking door of Studio 303 on the third floor of an old downtown building, still wrapped in my scarf. Pale morning light filters through the tall windows and falls across the hardwood floor and the large, almost empty room. The air carries a mixture of old wood and faint incense — something that already feels like an invitation to leave the ordinary world behind. I arrived a little early, nervous, my heart beating faster than usual. Around me, a few other participants stretch in silence or exchange shy smiles. English and French are being whispered. The atmosphere is quiet and charged at the same time: we are all here for a one-week intensive Butoh workshop with Denise Fujiwara, and none of us knows exactly what to expect.
Some inner journeys leave a mark you do not quite forget. My first real encounter with Butoh has become one of them.
Butoh: the art of transformation
To understand what unfolded during that week, it helps to begin with what Butoh is. Born in Japan in the late 1950s, in a period of profound post-war questioning, Butoh is sometimes described as the “dance of darkness.” Its founders, Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, developed the form in resistance to established conventions in dance and society. Butoh moved against the current: subversive, poetic, willing to enter shadow as much as light, the grotesque as much as the sublime, the living as much as what cannot be seen. Movements can become extraordinarily slow; bodies are sometimes painted white; faces can become intense, strange or almost otherworldly. Even the smallest gesture may carry enormous weight.
Beyond an aesthetic that can initially be disorienting, Butoh is, above all, an art of transformation. The performer searches less for what to do than for what to become. An old man, a child, a flower opening, an animal dying — almost anything can become a path. It is a sensory and sometimes spiritual exploration in which imagination leads the body. Images, memories and forces of nature are allowed to surface and move through the performer. In that sense, the body becomes a medium between the unconscious and the visible world, carrying raw emotions and universal questions. I was very far from my usual comfort zone as an actor. That was exactly why I wanted to be there.
Denise Fujiwara: when imagination leads the dance
If Butoh is an art of metamorphosis, Denise Fujiwara has become one of its important transmitters in Canada. Her dance practice spans more than forty years of intensive work, performance and study. A former gymnast and contemporary dancer, Denise encountered Butoh in the 1980s through Japanese master Natsu Nakajima — a meeting she has described as life-changing. Working with Nakajima required her, in her own telling, to begin again with a beginner’s mind and enter an artistic form far removed from many Western assumptions about dance. Under Natsu’s guidance, and through work connected to the late Yukio Waguri, another student of Hijikata, Denise entered deeply into the world of Butoh and eventually developed her own path through it.
Her approach today is centred on deeply embodied movement and imagination. Curiosity, awareness, presence and creativity sit at the heart of the work. Her career includes founding Fujiwara Dance Inventions, co-founding the CanAsian Dance Festival and creating major solo works such as Lost & Found. Her performances and workshops have taken her across several continents. Onstage, she is known for striking transformations and for bringing audiences into dreamlike, sometimes unsettling worlds. In the studio, however, I met a humble and deeply engaged teacher interested in passing on the art of scenic transformation. From the beginning, she invited us to be present, to leave the ego at the door and make room for whatever might emerge. For one week, I was going to have to loosen my habits as an actor and make myself available to the unknown.
Five days immersed in Butoh at Studio 303
The workshop unfolded over five consecutive mornings, from 9:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., in the intimate atmosphere of Studio 303. We were a small group of artists from different disciplines — dance, theatre, circus and more — brought together by the same desire to explore something different, something more visceral. Denise began each day with a gentle warm-up that almost felt like a ritual of its own. Barefoot on the floor, eyes closed, we took time to listen to our breathing and then softly “brush” the space around us with our hands. The exercise seemed almost too simple at first: fingertips moving through the air, hands caressing empty space. But it quickly changed the quality of attention in the room. I could feel the air slipping between my fingers; my thoughts began to quiet. The studio became a cocoon, a space where even a very small gesture was allowed to exist.
Once we had settled into that quality of attention, the explorations deepened. One of the first that stayed with me was what I began thinking of as an “air improvisation.” Denise asked us to imagine that our bodies were made of air, or that wind was moving through us. “Play with the invisible,” she encouraged us. “Let the air move you.” I closed my eyes and slowly raised one arm as though it were a feather carried by a breeze. Soon the whole room was moving: some bodies rippled like currents, others turned softly like dead leaves in the wind. It was silent, almost meditative. I felt light, relieved of the weight of being watched, as though the air itself had become both subject and scene partner. Something clicked for me: in Butoh, the invisible can be given form. Empty space can become as concrete a partner as a written scene is for an actor.
The work on extreme slowness was another turning point. If someone had told me that taking ten minutes to cross a room could be exhausting, I probably would not have believed them. And yet. One morning, Denise asked us simply to walk from one side of the studio to the other as slowly as possible. We began our slow walk, paying attention to every tiny transfer of weight and every muscle required to maintain balance. Within minutes my thighs were burning as if I had climbed ten flights of stairs, and sweat began to appear on my forehead.
My mind moved through several stages: impatience — am I slow enough? — then doubt — am I doing this correctly? — and finally something closer to surrender. At a certain point, I stopped “doing” the walk and simply walked. My gaze softened. My peripheral vision widened. The other slow-moving bodies around me began to register almost as though time itself had changed. The exercise felt endless and, at the same time, something very quiet happened inside me. Moving at the speed of a snail, I understood how each movement can emerge from silence and return to it. The slowness was not only a question of tempo. It was another way of inhabiting time, stretching it as though it were material. When we spoke afterward, several people described a heightened sense of presence, the feeling of having touched something unexpectedly deep. I understood exactly what they meant. I had never learned so much about myself from walking a few metres.
Over the week, Denise led us through many physical and imaginative explorations, often introducing them through poetic images. In one improvisation around metamorphosis, she invited us to let something in us die so that something else could be born. I imagined myself as a chrysalis about to open. I began curled tightly on the floor, barely breathing, then felt a need to stretch and free myself. My arms slowly opened like wet wings taking shape, my back unfolded, my eyes discovered a new world. When I opened them fully, I genuinely felt slightly altered, as though I had left an old skin behind. It gave me chills. I had touched something at the centre of Butoh’s promise: not to imitate transformation from the outside, but to let an image change you from within.
Balance and attention games were also part of the work. One day we worked in pairs. One person leaned forward, rigid like a plank, while the other caught them by the shoulders at the last possible moment. A very real exercise in trust. The first time I had to release control and let myself fall toward my partner, my heart jumped. Every survival reflex told me not to do it. I did it anyway. My partner caught me just before my face met the floor. The exercise sharpened my listening: there was no way to do it well without paying close attention to the other person, their breath and their timing. We switched roles, learning both how to trust and how to become trustworthy. Later we talked about the connection to stage presence — how supporting a partner has something in common with holding an audience. It asks for reliability, attention and generosity.
Our imaginations were constantly being activated. Denise would offer evocative images to stimulate movement: imagine your arms are branches loaded with memories; dance as though your feet are trying to root themselves into the earth while your head floats in the cosmos. I loved those instructions. With every new image I could see my colleagues take on another colour, and I felt unexpected movements appear in my own body. At one point we played a game in which each person offered an image or metaphor and the entire group embodied it for a few minutes. The studio became a strange bestiary and gallery of living paintings: one performer wandered like a ghost searching for its shadow, another seemed to become a breath of wind trapped inside a bottle. We moved between laughter and moments of pure grace. That freedom, without judgment, reminded me how many unnecessary barriers actors can build for ourselves. Butoh was asking us to play without trying to make it “beautiful”, and to welcome the strange, the awkward and the empty as well.
There was also something almost ritualistic in the way the week came to a close. On Friday, Denise led a kind of final ceremony. Together we improvised a slow dance in a circle, eyes half closed, accompanied by minimalist music. One by one, each person entered the centre for a few moments of free movement, almost like an offering to the others. When my turn came, I felt a wave of emotion — gratitude, and vulnerability too. I barely moved. I raised my hands toward the light coming through the window, then bowed in thanks. The gesture was simple, but for me it carried an almost sacred quality. After the circle opened again, Denise invited us to sit in silence and feel the echoes of the work. I was filled with a strange calm and a bittersweet happiness: grateful for what had happened, already sad that it was ending. Studio 303 seemed full of all the stories we had told there without words.
We finished sitting together on the floor and talking about the idea of the self in Butoh. Denise reminded us that onstage we are not necessarily there to show something; sometimes the work is to be. The performer may have to recede, empty out, and allow something larger or more universal to appear. We spoke about non-doing: not forcing an emotion or a movement, but creating the conditions in which it can emerge. Her phrase “Don’t perform, transform” stayed with me. As an actor, I am used to thinking in terms of playing a role. Here I was learning to become what I wanted to express, to drop the mask of performing and search for something more raw. I already suspected that lesson would travel far beyond the workshop.
What I took from it: the adventure is only beginning
After only five days, it would be ridiculous for me to claim that I understand Butoh in any complete sense. I do not. But the immersion gave me several valuable lessons that have stayed with me as an actor and as a person:
- The body knows before the intellect — I rediscovered that the body has its own memory and its own language. When I trust it and listen without judging immediately, an entire world of raw, authentic expression can open. Through movement, I reached images and emotions that words alone would not have released.
- Non-doing has power — Paradoxically, doing almost nothing onstage can sometimes have as much impact as doing everything. When I stop trying to control every gesture or manufacture every effect, something more truthful may have room to emerge. Presence can become powerful precisely through simplicity and restraint.
- The “fertile emptiness” — I experienced emptiness not as a lack, but as a space full of possibility. A quiet stage, a silence, an unmoving body can create palpable tension and a suspended moment in which anything might happen. Butoh taught me not to fear those empty spaces, but to recognize them as part of the storytelling.
- Deep listening — Whether I was listening to internal sensation, to a partner or to the atmosphere of the room, I became more aware of a kind of 360-degree attention. When I truly listened — to breath, tiny movements, distant sounds — I felt connected to something larger than my own plan. That quality of listening enriches stage work, but also changes the way you inhabit ordinary moments.
- A different relationship with the audience — We did not have an audience during the workshop, yet I came away imagining spectators differently. A performer who enters a sincere state of presence and transformation may reach an audience without needing to push. If the inner state is alive, it communicates. I now carry that thought into future roles: by being fully present — grounded, truthful and listening — I can create an invisible but powerful connection with the people watching.
When I left Studio 303 that Friday, I could feel that something small but real had shifted in me. I do not pretend I became a Butoh dancer in one week — that would completely underestimate the depth of the form. But I did add another sensitive string to my bow. I now have the beginning of a Butoh practice, a small flame I intend to keep alive. More importantly, I left with renewed humility about working with the body and enormous curiosity about what remains to discover. The more I learn, the more I understand how much I do not know. I find that exhilarating.
That week with Denise Fujiwara opened doors I had not expected, both as an actor and as a human being. It reminded me why I love the performing arts: they transform us, reveal us to ourselves and connect us to one another in ways that are difficult to explain. If you are adventurous and this kind of work calls to you, I can only encourage you to discover Denise Fujiwara’s work and Butoh more broadly — through a workshop, a performance or simply by learning more about this singular form. You may find yourself touched by its strange grace. For me, that week at Studio 303 remains a moment of intimate metamorphosis, an important step for an actor who now understands a little more clearly that sometimes you have to dance with the invisible in order to touch what is real.
