I ended up taking a butoh dance class for a couple of years. I hadn’t planned on joining something so unusual and intense, but before I realized it, I was fully immersed in it. Those were my craziest days with crazy people encompassing both the greatest and worst of me. I'm going to write about my most beautiful memories of a recital I participated in.

Butoh is a dance genre that originated in Japan. Tatsumi Hijikata invented the genre in the 1950s, so it isn't that old. Butoh, in my opinion, is a genre that combines two opposing elements: the avant-garde and the traditional, the personal and the universal. Butoh dancers come in a variety of body shapes and ages. Butoh is, in a sense, a genre that values spirit over technique.

Our instructors were a couple of fanatical, enthusiastic butoh dancers. There were five participants including my son and me. The instructor couple consistently held performances, and one day they came up with the concept of a recital in which all of us, instructors and participants alike, took part. We began practicing for it that day.

The venue for both the rehearsal and the recital was the main hall of a temple. One of the participants' family owned the temple and allowed us to use it for free. The recital took place in March, and we'd been rehearsing for it since February. The main hall was so large that the big oil heater wasn't enough to keep it warm. Our class usually met once a week, but after the recital was scheduled, we gathered in the freezing main hall every night to practice, and we could see our breath.