STATES: OBSERVATION: A Butoh Dance Trilogy: Origin, Mutation, and Entropy at Absolute Zero is devised and danced by SCOOP SLONE and presented at 3AM Theatre in association with New York Butoh Institute. This program is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and the New York Department of Cultural Affairs, and the City Council.

Rooted in quantum physics, STATES: OBSERVATION examines the idea that reality is probabilistic & undefined until observed. The act of observing a particle’s position, or state, changes the particle IT-Self, altering IT’s momentum & creating uncertainty. The trilogy contemplates the uncertain fluidity & trajectory of the Self through the fragmentation of identity & memory drawing from personal & collective queer narratives & symbolism as related but not limited to aloneism, outsiderism, compartmentalization, survivalism, and chameleonism, evoking a multiplicity of I-positions, or states: with dancer observing IT-Self like an audience member in 3rd person, as both subject & object; as a particle, the smallest fundamental state in the humyn body, which pops in & out of existence. 

These states are informed by a series of conditions specific to each state that change the nature of the Self based upon the observed conditions in the present moment. Yet with time as an entity folded upon IT-Self, past/present/future influence each other simultaneously, with dancer seeking to piece together a Self through these observations mirroring IT-Self back to IT-Self. A key concept is MA, the Japanese aesthetic of negative space, representing the voids between identity states. MA serves as a bridge in between past & future fragments of the Self, aligning with Zen Buddhist notions of emptiness—not as absence, but as a field of infinite possibility.  When the dancer appears to do nothing, IT holds transitional space for IT-Self in between one I-position and the arrival of the next, observing the gap between the conscious & unconscious Self, being led into the next positional state or memory.
I am not a Some Thing because of experience observed. I am because I am IT.