"All things were born from a single fire" say the fragments of the Chaldean Oracles. In fact, without the splendour of the dance of the Sun, not only would there be no light for our planet, but the solar system could not even have formed. The Sun is at the centre of our experience of the rhythm of existence. It distinguishes day from night, brings the fruits of the earth to maturity, controls the cycle of the seasons, and contributes to the water cycle. We can say with certainty that everything that happens on planet Earth depends on its position in relation to the star we call the Sun.

I invite you to ⁠⁠watch the trailer for my film Spring of a Dancer⁠ on YouTube⁠ and ⁠read my new book Spring of a Dancer on Amazon Books⁠.

Wondering what’s the point of dancing today is one of the questions that has been close to my heart since I started to get involved in dance. Just as butoh dance invites us to desecrate conventions and explore the areas that question the boundaries between masculine and feminine, life and death, grace and vulgarity; so philosophical thought invites us to question our beliefs, preparing us to enjoy questioning and criticising, rather than being satisfied with the answers we are able to provide today or that our ancestors gave us. Only philosophy, in fact, asks itself the question about truth and incessantly continues its critical exercise, without ever being satisfied with the answers that gradually emerge from this research. To avoid remaining imprisoned in our own little world, butoh dance and philosophy call us to go beyond ourselves and ask ourselves those fundamental questions that our ancestors have been asking themselves since the time of the cave: who are we, where do we come from, where are we going?

I invite you to ⁠⁠watch the trailer for my film Spring of a Dancer⁠ on YouTube⁠ and ⁠read my new book Spring of a Dancer on Amazon Books⁠.

The line between what is alive and what is dead is not so clear. Going through the pain of grief, I have learned that every ending is already a new beginning. None of us wants to grieve, certainly. Life can be difficult. Yet in the midst of the storm, we may surprise ourselves, turning our gaze beyond our skin frame. Like the fatigue of buds, during winter, we can let a new dance bloom when spring comes. From these thoughts my new project was born: ⁠Spring of a Dancer⁠. I hope it catches you in a moment of inspiration.

I invite you to ⁠watch the trailer for my film Spring of a Dancer⁠ on YouTube and read my new book Spring of a Dancer on Amazon Books.

When we look death in the face we learn a little more about living. This is what grief has taught me, but not only that.

Butoh dance has repeatedly allowed me to dance in the face of death. Indeed, as Hijikata Tatsumi says, the body of a butoh dancer is like a corpse desperately holding on. With our dance, which is life and death together, Ohno Kazuo teaches, we must be grateful for all those deaths that have allowed us to be here at this moment. The dance, then, is like a prayer to existence.

Every step of butoh is always held in the balance between life and death, breaking through walls, playing with the invisible.

Today I think the pain we face when we are faced with death is an initiation. Death is an experience that restores an essential connection with our ancestors. In the face of horror at what disappears we find ourselves having to answer the questions that humanity has always asked. Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?

In this episode I present you a reflection about dance as death education.

To achieve enlightenment, shamans teach, one must first bury oneself in the cave. In fact, they say, to open our gaze, we must close our eyes in the darkness of the earth.

The shaman, like the butoh dancer, lives straddling the world of the living and the world of the dead, sometimes exchanging favor and sometimes hostility with spirits.

Like alchemists, shamans challenge the boundaries between mortal and immortal things. Guarding the laws that govern the motions of the heavens, they plunge into what most consider “the end” or, rather, “the limit”, to return hermetic messages.

The butoh dancer, for Hijikata Tatsumi, dances like a corpse desperately holding itself up, falling and rising again trespassing between worlds, defying the rules that separate the sacred from the obscene, as in ancient Greek tragedies.

That darkness it passes through is so dark as to be luminous. It takes a journey into the body’s possibilities of connecting in, out, and beyond its own skin frame. Like the ancient ascetics of death, it sees its skeleton glowing with a golden light.

Dancing taught me that none of us live merely under our own skin. John Dewey, an American philosopher of the 20th century, said that our organs, in fact, are made to connect with what goes beyond our skin. This is why I teach dance.

With my FÜYA method I invite my students to reflect on the meaning of dance and on the fact that dance actually allows us to experience our inner world, therefore dancing our inside; to experience what is around us, to dance our outside and also to dance even concepts such as death, and this is all that allows us to dance beyond our bodily frame, beyond our skin.

Dance offers experiences that are completely free and queer, there are no gender or sex limitations, there are no limitations regarding our age, our physical capabilities and our abilities motor. Dance can be absolutely inclusive: there is no right or wrong movement.

Butoh dance allows us to adhere to contexts that we can define as "dance therapy", "art therapy", to develop experiences which are useful for dealing with trauma, for dealing with mourning, and therefore for dealing with those situations in which to see the difference between a before and an after.

WADING invites listeners to walk through the metaphorical river that separates worlds, much like the mythic crossings guided by Charon in ancient lore.

This podcast is a journey into that very process of transcending what is immediately present.

Through the expressive power of butoh dance — a performance art form that delves deep into the human spirit of ritual rebellion — and the philosophical insights of thinkers like Emanuele Severino, WADING explores how we navigate and understand the layers of reality that lie beyond the surface.

Find out more on the website www.damianofina.it