Masthead


» café reason
»» history
»» reason
»» logo
»» people
»» ana barbour

» butoh

» diary

» new work

» past work

» classes

» contacts

Café Reason
Café Reason's logo
Café Reason's logo


LOGO

"When you have a goddess
as the creator, it's her own body
that is the universe."

(Joseph Campbell)

The 'spirals with eggs' logo was first used by Café Reason in the publicity for their production, Bona Dea (the Good Goddess). It is a copy of a dish from the Neolithic Bulgarian Karanovo culture, dating from around 4500BC. The symbols that appear on it are part of the iconography of the Old European Great Goddess, whose worship spread across the whole of the Near East, Mediterranean, and central, northern and western Europe. This early belief system existed for a very long time, far longer than the Indo-European Warrior/Sovereign based mythologies and the much newer monotheistic religions that supplanted it.

The Goddess symbolised the enduring cycle of birth and death, of fertility and decay, of life creation and regeneration that was at the heart of early agricultural communities, and the pictorial 'language' which appears systematically and persistently on cult objects and ceramics from all over the region expresses these beliefs.

According to archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, the 'eggs' on the Karanavo dish represent not simply life, but rebirth and continuity, the repeated recreation of the world, while the swirling spirals are symbols of energy and unfolding; of the dynamic, reciprocal, natural forces that keep the wheel in motion.

In butoh, we seek connection with our most ancient selves, emptying our minds of modern preoccupations, allowing the vital energy of the dance to possess our bodies. In our dance we carry the potentiality of the egg and the life-force of the spiral: we are born, are transformed, become.