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Perhaps the Flower Dance is best described with an extract from a book I'm currently writing:

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"we approach the gorse flower as if it were a letter, a word, and in reading this word, we know it. 

But to read this word truly, we must read under its shell, for this word is a sea creature

in the great ocean of being, and under the shell we find the hidden marrow - Logos.  

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In this fashion of approach, we attend to nature as parabolic; the gorse is both a story and a storyteller.

We linger over this story, when we linger by the gorse.

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We become very quiet and still, and we listen with our eyes. We listen with our skin, our fingers,

to the great singer The Gorse and we move in accordance with this song. 

The participation involved in this dance emerges in the bearing witness to the marrow, 

we see this word is fitly spoken and yet in our beholding, we are beheld -

for the ocean is always eavesdropping,

and we, too, are words and sea creatures

with shells covering our fleshy parts

like silver engraved into gold.

 

And so the gorse is true, held in truth, born from truth and intended by truth,

and so are you, and so is this moment.

This is inescapable, the liberation in the limitation.

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As words spoken, the gorse and I, we dialogue

- the silent dialogue of presences -

and I walk through the door of the gorse to the Kingdom

and the gorse brings forth sweetness from my honeycomb bones

and I am sweating honey, in our lingering together.

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The act of the dance is born through receptivity,

where the spirit of the movement is annunciated in the moment.

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Hold the moment, effortlessly, firmly, being held by the moment; embracing.

We let the moment rub us between its fingers, gently moving, pressuring and breaking us,

like a carrot seed for fragrance, or ears of grains for hidden kernels.

We scatter and we plume, and so too, we touch moment the same, and for that moment

we are bone of bone"

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​Of course, in the gardens of East Sussex where this was filmed, we don't tend to keep gorse bushes in the garden, but out on the Ashdown Forest they arch majestic in the spring. 'On Flowers' is a response to Christopher Smart's Jubilate Agno with a secret particular fondness for his cat, Geoffrey. Butoh exalts the unfinished - this video has some of that. It is the flower dance in its first germination, whereas the writing above is closer to its current calyx.

Still, 'On Flowers' is a dance of desire, bloom and death; a praise.

Reaching. Merging. Hiding. Revealing. Dying; a nod towards a slow erotic; flower-light.

A magpie remembering the English dreamers, grieving Ophelia,

nesting in the insanity of beauty.

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As Smart says wisely:

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'For flowers are good both for the living and the dead.

For there is a language of flowers.

For there is a sound reasoning upon all flowers.

For elegant phrases are nothing but flowers.

For flowers are peculiarly the poetry of Christ.

For flowers are medicinal.

For flowers are musical in ocular harmony.'

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[Jubilate Agno]

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