Born in the sociopolitical context of the post-war Japan, the Butô is a subversive dance characterized by its slowness, its poetry and its minimalism. This danse, similar to a performance, is not spectacular as it arises as an introspection and can be done without any public.

Guided by Ichiara Akihito, a dancer from the famous band Sankai Juku, and by Sono Fukunishi, a Japanese artist established in Paris, I did this serie composed of 9 images back in May 2013 as a cycle that can be read in different ways.

When photographing dance there is always the risk of limiting the photography to a documentary. However, we were looking here to create an original artwork with our 6 hands that would respect the traditional Butô codes. This lead us to decide to ask Ichiara to perform static postures, each one of them representing a sculpture.

An Egg, a Skull, a rice-powder whitened skin are fundamental symbols used in Butô. The way colors interact, invert their hierarchy in order to form an almost monochromatic artwork, making the body move from a constructivist architecture as in Moholy-Nagy’s pictures to a sentimental explosion as in the German expressionism.