Butoh: Metamorphic Dance and Global Alchemy

17. Butoh Ritual Mexicano

17 Butoh Ritual Mexicano Diego Piñón in Mexico and Chicago (2006) Diego Piñón was born in Mexico City in 1957. He comes from the Purepecha culture, now identified with the Tarascan Indians, and was exposed as a child to their primal dances. The Purepecha resisted Spanish culture, even retaining their own language. When I interviewed him in March 2006 in Chicago, Piñón told me that he doesn’t remember a time when he did not dance. He began his formal study of dance and somatic modalities in 1975 with Mexican teachers of a form called Energetic Movement. In 1979, he completed studies in the social sciences and began dancing at the Centro Superior de Coreografía in Mexico City. He continued learning through the study of body therapies and modern dance forms originating in the United States. Since 1987, he has trained in butoh with many of the progenitors of this form. Piñón eventually developed a unique voice for butoh through his Butoh Ritual Mexicano, pouring his unique inheritance through intercultural alchemy. Ito Life is provocation for releasing our sacred selves, and butoh opens up this irritation to my most intimate self. —Diego Piñón In shamanistic style, Piñón’s solo dance Ito is performed to enchant the hot Mexican desert. His dance fosters a warm and dry desert psychology, like that 192 Essays and Poetry on Transformation Figure 27. Diego Piñón dances Ekua Itsi II (Behind the Mirror) in 2006 in Chicago. Photograph by Florence Poulain,© 2008. Used by permission of Florence Poulain. of other famous shamans in Mexico, mystical psychologists who have been influential in the West, especially Don Miguel Ruiz of the Toltec and ethnologist Carlos Castaneda. Ruiz teaches in his Four Agreements (1997)1 an impeccability of word and spirit similar to that of Piñón’s butoh, and in several volumes beginning in 1968, Castaneda teaches somatic psychology through the trickster wisdom of his Yaqui shaman tutor Don Juan Matus, daring readers to mysterious adventures of the soul and nonordinary reality in the Sonoran Desert. The question of whether Castaneda’s books are fictional or serve as anthropological data remains unresolved, though certainly not unchallenged.2 In any case, they filled a need in their time for those who sought truths beyond the proofs of modern science and still apply to those who transmogrify, if only in their dreams and dances. I read all of Castaneda’s works, enthralled, and only tired Butoh Ritual Mexicano 193 of their repetition toward the end. I loved his stories and advice and wondered that he might be playing two roles at once: that of himself as student and that of Don Juan as teacher and Mesoamerican shaman. I learned from his stories most about the blurry line between fiction and reality, how to be resilient, the importance of expanding my horizons by losing personal history, and that it might be desirable to disappear sometimes. When I see Piñón dance, I feel the presence of Ruiz and Castaneda and the deep wisdom teachings of Mexico. Piñón’s dance is stainless: True to the desert, his untiring presence is honed of butoh alchemy, changing slowly with the sunset, the soft sounds of chanting, and the shifting sand. Piñón shuffles, slowly walking on the smooth sand, a flowing figure with a long, white cloth wrapped around his middle, feathers stuck to his body, and ritual painting covering his head, arms, and chest like lines of beads. Without heroism, his dance faces the day as it fades into shadows. Piñón dances into dusk, a recovered fragment of Hijikata Tatsumi struggling to stand upright. He returns for the night and the darkness, listening for what? His hand presses his head as we hear a waltz in the distance, a Mexican folk tune played on the guitar. The dance creates a dream state, a lost world we can enter through the dancer’s search for a more innocent state. His body glows pink in the night against the dark blue of the receding desert. “For me,” Piñón says, “life is provocation for releasing our sacred selves, and butoh opens up this irritation to my most intimate self.” Piñón credits Ohno Kazuo-sensei with deepening the spirit of his dance: “Ohno guided me through a pure connection to my mother.” Piñón told me that when he first met Ohno and...