ABSTRACT

Butoh is the dance of the ineffable–that which cannot be spoken but must be encountered, witnessed within the dance. This chapter offers verbal fragments for encounter, attempting to do justice to Shakina Nayfack’s experience and beliefs, and to butoh more broadly, by resisting notions of fixedness, totality, and linearity while foregrounding her voice and transfeminist, trans-butoh spirit. It addresses the impossibility of talking about both butoh and the transgender experience in a linear academic format. She is author of the book Butoh Ritual Mexicano/Alchemy Is Dancing, a transfeminist, transborder, and transhistorical ethnographic analysis of her experience training under Diego Pinon in Tlalpujahua, Mexico. As Shakina put it, "butoh is the kind of thing that reveals itself in poetry more than prose." The ways in which Shakina's transition experience corresponds with her butoh journey is itself a kind of living poetry that transcends form.