Yes, I think that there are a lot of things you can think about with Butoh and that's why it can be very much an individual dance. Goda Nario, a very well-known Butoh critic, talked last year about Hijikata and about how childhood is really valuable for an artist to remember. Everyone's baby experience is really quite similiar, no matter what culture. There are more similiarities than not. Then you also have the fact that we were all in the womb — we all have the experience of being in the womb, being born… So there's the individual, the life histories — and that would include all the cultural influences — then there's also the universal experience of being born, being a fetus. Then, I think, in part because of my childhood, there's the link to nature… the experience of being a human being in nature, which is a very Japanese way of viewing human beings and nature. I also feel that — I don't know if it's Jungian or Freudian — there's the pre-form time, the state of the fetus or the child before they've become cognizant of the world, and the history of the beginning of man developmentally. We all come from that primal being — psychologically as well as physically. I feel like I can tap into that, it doesn't matter where I'm from.

In the last month or so my husband was reading something about the idea that race is a cultural construct — an intriging thought . I really like that people look and speak differently, the fact that the world has many cultures and many customs… this is what I really love… the diversity of people in the world and the combinations that you find in their backgrounds. To me, that's the richness of the world… but I think at the base of that, we're all alive, and we're all human beings. All the other stuff is so much a social construct.

I know I touched on this earlier — the body as a metaphor for how you individually choose to express the experience of the body — but there's a popular quote about Butoh that says Butoh is about "metamorphosis, not metaphors." How do you interpret that, or do you feel it's an accurate description?

Well, I think it depends. Different people have different takes on it — the way they work with the body is different. One of the things I was realizing in the last year or so is that some peoples' expressions, and it's not black or white, it's more like this or more like that, tend to be more what I call body-orientated. If you perform in the nude, sometimes that would naturally seem to make it more body-orientated… in that you would have the full experience of the physical body, and all the flesh, and the proportions, and the skin, and everything… whether you're in make-up or not. Min Tanaka is an example of that — I think he's very body-centered. Ohno is not body-centered; he's more soul-spirit-mind centered. My work combines both of those, but I think I'm more spirit-soul-mind centered. The body is less important to me, and that doesn't mean I don't consider how the body moves or its shape. In that way, I think I know in words what the people mean when they say it's not metaphors, it's about metamorphosis. On one hand, what is a metaphor? The reason, I think, they say it's not metaphor is that there's this sense of direct experience with the body — the body doesn't stand for anything… the body is the body, and yet the body can transform… it can become some other material.

Buddhism is so important underneath it all, the whole experience of the self, and the body, and mind — and how the mind moves the body. But on the other hand, there's the sense that the body is there, doing what it does. I think about the Bonsai and the way the Japanese really appreciate nature, and this is a generalized statement, but the Japanese seem to appreciate it most when it's shaped by the hands of man. In many ways, Butoh is contemporary. But Butoh holds the seeds of the ancient, yet celebrates the contemporary. I think it's a very real experience of the body.

Butoh is different than a lot of the other forms, it's closer to authentic movement. From Hijikata's early work, Butoh was something to be shared with an audience — it remains a performance. I wrote a paper for a conference last Fall about performing the body, and Butoh, to my understanding, is both about performing and not performing the body. The whole thing here is what is the body and what do we mean by body and the whole mind-body thing. It's so much about existence and being that it's not performing anything, it just is… and with the "is-ness," it has no intention. As Buddha says, it's not actively seeking out, it just is. Ashikawa's work isn't so much body-centered. Min Tanaka's work is especially. He calls himself a farmer and dancer. He's so close to the earth and working on the land, and more and more that's his practice, a body-practice — in which the training is working on the earth.

So what is the body? What is the art of the body? What is the expressivity of the body? What is just the body? There's also the idea of the state of being, and the continual transformation of being. It's difficult to understand the methods, such as when Ashikawa worked with the ideas of insects eating out the insides of the body or lightning bolts striking the body. What happens with those particular images is that it creates a different state or condition of the body. The only way that really happens is by the power of the mind to either be there, or not. It always comes back to the Buddhist emptiness. The mixture of Buddhism and Shintoism is fundamental to Japan. Someone like Hijikata, who cast off these influences and then explored and created this way of working in this particular aesthetic — that's very old and very new at the same time, very individual, and very inclusive.

When I first was in Japan and was running around Kyoto, I was taking some photos, and everywhere I turned I didn't have to do anything — the compostion was perfect. Whether it was the flowers and the trees, or this next to that, the building, the wood…. In Japan, there's this almost innate sense of harmony and balance everywhere you turn. It's really wonderful, but I think when you look at the culture and some of the restrictions people place on each other, it can be oppressive. The sense of beauty is immense, to me the Buddhism and Zen, particularly, the aesthetics and the sense of space and time, looking at the traditional painting that comes from China, the sense of perspective where you have the white canvas, how you make three dimensions out of two — this is not how Western arts constuct perspective. Also, that sense of suggestion, the whole thing's about suggestion and the art of concealment. All these things are related to the arts and languages of China and Korea, but the Japanese have made them their own.

Min Tanaka speaks of dancing not in the place, but dancing the place.