The Sleeping Dog is an unconventional Japanese Butoh dance performance never before seen in Bulgaria until last week. The performance, choreographed by Japanese dancer Masaki Ivana, will be shown twice a month at the National Theatre Ivan Vazov.

"The idea of the dance show is for the dancer to manage to push everything deeply human out of himself," said Mila Ivanova, an actress and dancer in the performance.

According to her, working with the famous Japanese choreographer taught her discipline. When performing, she remembers his words: "On the stage, every dancer should be thinking as a bird in order to create a great Butoh performance."

What she considers innovative about Ivana, is the way he develops the Butoh dance further, by combining it with elements of Western theatre and visual effects. "The underlying concept is still and unmistakably `Ankoku Butoh' (the Dance of Darkness)," Ivanova said.

She explained that this particular Japanese dance form was created in the late 1950s, as a response to the loss of the war and the American occupation, reflecting the atmosphere of suffering and uncertainty in Japan in the post war era. It was a new theatrical language, drawing on the Japanese traditions of noh and kabuki theatre, and combining them with influences from Western contemporary dance and literature.

"In it, sets and lighting are exquisite and emphasize the power of the highly controlled movements of the dance in combination with the unusual music," Ivanova said. It creates a startling atmosphere of intensity and highly unusual inwardness - sometimes disturbing - and makes it utterly distinct from anything in Western dance and theatre.

According to her, Butoh also combines dance, theatre, improvisation, and influences of Japanese traditional performing arts with German Expressionist dance and performance art, to create a unique performing art form that is both controversial and universal in its expression. "What is amazing about the dance is the fact that it breaks with the established rules and leaves much room for improvisation," she added.

Characteristics one often sees are the white painted bodies, the slow movements, the bold heads and contorted postures. The dance evokes images of decay, of fear and desperation; images of eroticism, ecstasy and stillness.

Butoh's birth can be traced back to ceremonies in which rituals play an important role. "Rituals are the souls of the community, where we encounter its values and moral codes," Ivanova said. The history of dance shows the declination of such rituals. Along with the narrative ballets there appeared the modern dance, which became more and more abstract, more focused on pure movement.

What Ivanova recalls from being taught by Ivana, is that Butoh connects the conscious with the unconscious. "Movement is not dictated from the outside, but, appears in the interaction between the outer and inner worlds," she said.

"Masaki always forced us to accent the essence of the dance on the mechanism through which we stop being ourselves and become a different person or something else," she said.

For the dancers in the Sleeping Dog, the plot is pretty simple and connected to real life stories where there is love, friendship and true feelings. The musical selection of the choreographer, and Verdi's aria, are in harmony with the contrasts displayed in the whole performance, according to Ivanova.

Sleeping Dog can be seen tonight at 7.30pm at the National Theatre Ivan Vazov.