In the open air, it was difficult to hear Manu’s instructions clearly. Together, some 15 or 20 of us, barefoot on a field in unseasonably warm weather, followed his direction to become unfamiliar, estranged even, from our bodies. We unlearned how to move our limbs and how to hoist ourselves up against gravity. We moved as though we were puppets on strings, and we shuffled across the grass ever so slowly as though we were pillars of ash liable to crumble with any sudden movement. Strange, I thought, but safe. The worst had not come to pass. This wasn’t dance; it was slow movement. But Manu soon beckoned us back into a circle, and from afar, I thought I heard the word demon. I felt an immediate upwelling of fear. Manu pulled a grotesque face and then gestured to the person beside him. Each of us, in turn, was to take on the demon of the person before us and express our own for the person after us. “No,” I thought. “Can’t do it.”
It’s said in myth that fear is like a dragon guarding treasure, our treasure. I have faint intimations of what that treasure is for me, glimmers here and there, but I know full well what my dragon is. The fear of ridicule, of being ridiculous. And with every mythical dragon comes, in some form or another, a knight or hero to slay it—Tristan of King Arthur’s Round Table, Sigurd of the Völsunga Saga, and Saint George, patron saint of England, to name but a few. But there is no dragon to be vanquished nor knight to do the vanquishing. I am the dragon and the knight. And yet there remains, from time to time, a sense of some monstrous impediment come forth, a dragon’s lair manifesting when the conditions are right. Like when someone, such as myself, born with a predisposition towards the quieter end of the personality spectrum, finds themselves on or around a dance floor. Or on a field about to make a fool out of themselves in front of 20 or so people.
~
A wave of demon faces crested towards me. In a pantomime of shock, I clasped both hands over my mouth and passed myself over to the next person. When the wave came full circle, Manu instructed the next person, in all their monstrosity, to enter our formed circle. “Not me,” I thought. “Please don’t choose me.” But the demons drew near. Someone off to my right was tagged in. He staggered back and forth as though carrying a heavy phantom weight in his arms, then, by chance, dropped it into mine. I tumbled to the grass and crawled. Even with sunglasses and a beanie hat, I felt completely exposed. It was quiet and serious all of a sudden. I crawled and crawled until I reached what felt to be the edge of the circle and tagged in the nearest person I could find. I stood afterwards in the warm afterglow of embarrassment and relief. And thereafter, for what felt like no time at all, our group unleashed maniacal demons, wailing demons, timid demons, demons that pranced and twirled about in whimsy and demons that slithered across the grass like serpents.
~
In the Dark Ages, with knowledge accrued from centuries of expedition, cartographers set down their impressions of the Earth’s known geography. But their maps were incomplete, for the surface of the Earth had not yet been explored in its entirety. As a warning to seafarers a few Latin-speaking mapmakers inscribed upon these dark corners of the Earth the phrase Hic Sunt Dracones. Here Be Dragons. When Manu pitched us the opportunity to practice Butoh, the dance of darkness, he elaborated that not only was it a dance in response to the darkness of world war but also a dance out of darkness—the darkness of the inconceivable.