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THE UNIVERSE
2025
4K video | 16:9 | 12.37 min. | color | sound


The heart of Buddhist teaching and practice lies in dissolving the mistaken identification with an independent personal self. Drawing upon this insight, The Universe poetically dissolves the boundaries between self and object. This experiential insight unfolds in the short film through three sequences of Butoh performance interwoven with a poem that poses the fundamental questions: “Who am I? Who are you? Who are we?” The three Butoh dancers seem to embody the answer, their movements suggesting they are animated by forces beyond themselves, while golden masks in the elemental shapes—circle, square, and triangle—conceal their individual faces. These geometrical forms refer to the Edo-period painting The Universe (Maru-Sankaku-Shikaku) by the Japanese Zen monk Sengai Gibon (1750–1837), which depicts the same shapes and alludes to the Zen concept of Mu—the void as a principle of reality that transcends all dualities: existence and nonexistence, self and other, being and nothing. Dancing on the threshold of nothingness, the performers’ movements express transhuman qualities of the All, where experience becomes an expression of the infinite flow of existence, and where form and emptiness ceaselessly transform into one another.



Written / Directed / Camera / Edited: Kay Walkowiak
Butoh Dancers: Kudo Taketeru, Tomoshi Shioya, Emiko Agatsuma
Narrators: Meguru Hirose, Irene Dewald, Maika Utsugi
Voice Recording & Mix: Chikage Imai, Emu Studio Nagoya, Nigel Brown
Music Composition: Natalia Domínguez Rangel
Color Grading: Andi Winter
Sound Editing: Nigel Brown
Production Assistant: Barbara Walkowiak
Translation: Jacques Carrio, Chikage Imai, Hiroki Tsurumoto
Special Thanks: Nobuyoshi Asai, Studio Terpsichore, Valentin Ruhry
Supported by: Federal State of Austria, City of Vienna





︎ Archive Film