This chapter focuses on the activist potential of butoh through analyses of urban interventions performed in Los Angeles and Brazil. The coexistence of "victims of 9/11" with that of "Iraqis fleeing" demonstrated that the polysemic power of butoh had not been lost in a space dominated by well-defined messages. One performance that captured the particular challenges of using butoh as a form of protest was staged in 2013 in response to the forced displacement of marginalized subjects from "Praca Roosevelt," a famous Sao Paulo square. Butoh becomes protest when its explicit politics dances in those liminal space between outrage at asymmetries of power and the Foucauldian lesson that power is everywhere, between the abstract and the literal, the public and the private, the individual and the collective. The urgency of certain causes, financial limits, and a philosophy of democratic access to butoh as protest create ensembles of varying levels of training and understanding of its "trance-formative" potential.