Pictured is a Butoh dance entitled Cihuatl 15 performed by endy, at a Prayer for Juarez on Saturday, March 20.  Her endurance piece on Saturday offered time and opportunities for inquiry, contemplation and processing in response to the femicides in Juarez.  In preparation for this dance movement, she laid still on the sidewalk in front of Casa 0101, as sand was poured over her body, representing the women who had died in Ciudad Juarez and buried in shallow graves.

Butoh’s source is the Japanese avant-garde of the 1960s, a period when Japan struggled with the lingering effects of the atomic bomb detonations at Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended World War II. Originally called “ankoku butoh,” or “dance of darkness,” the medium created a space for the intensely grotesque and perverse on the stage. In Japan endy studied  “Sankai Juku” which means “studio by the mountain and the sea,” and implies the serenity and calm which is characteristic of the work.  She also studied and has performed with Guillermo Gomez-Peña.