What If We Were the End Ones? — Collapse, Butoh Mutations and Cosmo-technics in the Swedish Arctic

Photographer: ProduktivaProduktioner

How do we live out our personal myths when the modern world demands only our hyper-efficient, capitalistic utility? What is the ritual of a life lived at the threshold of collapse and rebirth?

Myth and Ritual as Threshold These questions anchored a profound 9-day somatic journey at the Moskosel Creative Lab in northern Sweden, taking place in April 2026. Led by facilitator Dominique Savitri Bonarjee, ten somatic adventurers gathered in the subarctic to engage with the energy of Butoh, under the title “What if we were the end ones?”. The phrase set the tone for the entire encounter: a mythic, speculative field in which ritual, collapse, mutation and rebirth unfolded not as abstract themes, but an immersive study of how the body might become a somatic vessel for myth, memory, and transformation.

Born in post-WWII Japan from the tumultuous hybridity of traditional Japanese culture and Western avant-garde ideologies, Butoh treats the body as a porous site of transmutation. Over the course of the retreat, this manifested as a serious play of ritual, non-duality, and a radical blurring of boundaries between the human and non-human.

The retreat also created a powerful ethics of witnessing. The ten adventurers were paired into five duos acting as ‘witness lovers’ (a concept borrowed from Sufism): for movement practice and cleaning tasks alike. This meant more than observation but enabling service, attention, and reciprocal openness: the mover opened their body to become entirely available, while the witness called forth and validated the unseen.

1. The Mutated Autobiography: Becoming the Others Our practice commenced with the free-writing of poetic, mutated autobiographies, and obituaries towards the end of the adventure — either of our current selves or of imaginary beings. This process invoked Butoh’s co-founder Tatsumi Hijikata’s famous provocation: ‘When your hand is not yours’. Through the somatic alterity of skin, costume, and props, we initiated a process of deep transformational shape-shifting.

In my own text, titled I am a Boulder, I wrote purely from the explicit perspective of lithic matter. Yet, upon reading it, traces of my own human voice surfaced unexpectedly. This exercise highlighted a fluid interchanging of perspective; as philosopher Ichikawa Hiroshi notes, the Butoh soma is inherently ‘a plethora of Nature and Change’ (cited in Fraleigh, 2020). We do not merely mimic the Others; we collapse and slip into the ontological distance between the flesh and the more-than-human.

Photographer: Dominique Savitri Bonarjee

2. The Non-Duality of Collapse: From Cities to the Frozen Lake

A cornerstone of Savitri’s ten-year research initiative is the exploration of Collapse, which is another motif of the retreat. In solo and partner work, we explored collapse and rising not as a binary opposition but as a non-dual process, with gravity as an invisible collaborator.

Indoors, within the golden warmth of the dance studio, our bodies paddled through imageries and changing intensity of resistance, transforming from dams and rushing water into a collective confluence of flesh resembling a Zen rock garden. My partner Jacob and I closed our eyes, sensing each other’s weight and movement to navigate the symbiosis of in-betweenness with breath and attention.

Out on the frozen lake, collapse took on a different texture. This came in elemental contrast to a previous somatic collapse I experienced under the oppressive skyscrapers of Central London's financial district in 2024 with Savitri. The ice offered a simultaneous agency of friction and slippage, making surrender and resistance unanticipated yet materially legible. Such encounters illuminated the core of Butoh's non-dual formlessness: between moving and being moved; sharpening the question of whether internal attention or external attraction moves us.

Photographer: Dominique Savitri Bonarjee

3. Cosmo-technics and the Alignment of Qi and Dao

Integrating the practices of Qi-gong and Tai Chi Chuan deepened our understanding of the bodily intelligence. Through the meridian system[1], we traced invisible pathways connecting the physical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of the body: the Dantian appeared as a cauldron brewing a primordial somatic soup, and the pelvis as a basin of circulation of infinity. 

In paired exercises, Yin and Yang were not treated as static opposites, but as a shifting gradient of sensitivity and relation. Our hands served less as instruments but became sensory mediums, sensitizing the subtle perception of air around us at a subconscious level.

Savitri seamlessly contextualized this generative opposition within what Indian philosophy terms Lila — the cosmic, divine play of creation that is often paired with the dynamic balance of Shiva-Shakti. Through these hand movements with our partners, opposition is metaphorically transmuted into a sacred, non-human androgyny manifested through stones, branches, and trees.

Evolving her practice from Eastern traditions and living experiences between cultures and ethnicities, Savitri also drew connections to the Hong Kong philosopher Yuk Hui (許煜) and his concept of cosmo-technics (cosmo-tech). Hui defines cosmo-technics as the unification of a culture’s cosmic order (Cosmos) and its moral/technical practices (Technics). He argues against a singular, universal technology, noting that contemporary AI is dangerously monocultural, built almost exclusively on Silicon Valley’s capitalistic paradigm.

Continuing the theme surrounding respect for distinct cosmological worldviews, the ancient Chinese fable of Ding the Cook (庖丁解牛) resonates philosophically. Ding butchers an ox effortlessly by gliding his blade through the natural spaces between the joints, evoking the notion of movements that follow the veins of the body rather than forcing against them, suggesting a mode of action rooted in attunement. Here, the knife represents Qi (器),  the tool or vessel; whilst the anatomical space represents Dao (道),  the cosmic harmony and natural order.

In this light, Butoh serves as an exemplary alternative cosmo-technics. It is not presented as a codified technique, but as an ethic of embodiment that resists instrumental efficiency and instead seeks cosmic harmony with non-human agency, environment, and morphing temporality.

Photographer: Elspeth Chan Chi Fan

4. The Deep Ocean of Time

‘How much attention does one allow to go deep into the ocean of time?’

Savitri introduced Edmund Husserl’s non-linear phenomenological time, urging us to dive into our own internal temporality and porosity. The absolute porosity opens up our fascia and anatomy — which is time — to memories and visions that do not belong to us.

To travel from this dark side of the moon, we engaged in an ecstatic dark dance. Immersed in a 2-hour sensuous sound journey in which duration felt suspended, the subtle or astral body came forward as a vehicle of dream, emotion, and consciousness.

5. Embodied Philosophy: Spanda, Quantum Flux, and Non-Duality

The kinetic interplay of Yin and Yang echoes the existential spectrum of 0 and 1 proposed by Butoh master Yoshito Ohno — an endless loop of death and rebirth occurring every second. Savitri also remarked that non-duality is not the same as non-binary. In Butoh, non-duality is often expressed through movement that appears and disappears, rather than striving linearly toward fixed forms. This concept was beautifully illuminated during an evening screening of Savitri’s film, Spanda (Pulsation). At both micro and macro scales, pulsation seems to describe the primal impulse that sets in motion the undulating rhythm of emergence and submergence of the cosmo.

Through this lens, our bodies and minds reside everywhere and nowhere, navigating what can be understood as a quantum move. This is manifested when Savitri invited us to bring found objects to an outdoor session and to generate movements by embodying the material qualities. Holding a dark stone and a pinecone resembling a pangolin shell, I danced with my witness lover David whilst he scooped up raw ice from the lake. Difference became a source of movement: these objects had strikingly different textures and weights, yet as we moved with them, our gestures were shaped by both materialities. This dynamic practice stretched duality (of materialities) into fertile multiplicity, opening movements into wider metaphoric possibilities.

 This non-dual methodology extended directly into our administrative and creative processes. Emily and I, responsible for documenting the retreat’s unfolding rituals, adopted a collaborative Yin and Yang framework. By treating documentation not as a passive recording, the creative process itself became a testament to how non-duality can foster collaboration and imagination.

Photographer: Elspeth Chan Chi Fan

6. Act of Remembrance  The retreat culminated in individual processional rituals traversing the studio, the forest, and the frozen lake. Inspired by my first glimpse of the Aurora Borealis, my mutated autobiography, and my obituary, I enacted a burial ritual entitled Gestation of Remembrance. This sharing was guided by the writing of anthropologist Tim Ingold (1993): 

‘To perceive the landscape is therefore to carry out an act of remembrance, and remembering is not so much a matter of calling up an internal image, stored in the mind, as of engaging perpetually with the environment that is itself pregnant with the past’.

Ingold’s observation that landscape is remembered through ongoing engagement rather than stored image felt especially resonant here. Memory was not housed solely in the body, but distributed across land, weather, and atmosphere. The quantum move emerged as I involved in Jimmy’s ritual as a corpse, then my own burial ritual into the rebirth — cycle of dying, awakening, collapsing, and rising as individual and also collective.

Closing Passage with the Open Question  We had the privilege of participating in traditional Sámi ritual facilitated by Jimmy. Reflecting on the Sámi's ongoing struggle against cultural assimilation to preserve their language and identity, the title of our retreat took on a haunting historical weight: What if we were the end ones?

By offering our own lived myths and non-linear rituals into this northern landscape, we signaled a generative closing with slow turning Sufi meditation. Touching our heart chakras while spinning, we shared a gesture of care that seemed to open and widen our ocean of temporality once again. Touching the dance floor, we accessed the bubbling spring acupuncture point on the soles of our feet, realizing that the physical sole is precisely the threshold where we reach the soul.

Photographer: Elspeth Chan Chi Fan

Notes [1] The Meridian system is a foundational concept in traditional Chinese medicine, representing a network of invisible pathways that circulate vital energy, known as qi, throughout the body. (https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/complementary-and-alternative-medicine/meridian-chinese-medicine)