Sharon Stern arrived at Naropa University, the first Buddhist-inspired university in America, with a portfolio of glamorous head shots. She had a heart-shaped face and a guileless smile. She was twenty-eight and had recently married Todd Siegel, whom her friends all described as the perfect husband. Naropa, which was founded in Boulder, Colorado, in 1974, by a former Buddhist monk, has three meditation halls that students visit throughout the day. “You are encouraged to let go of habitual patterns of thought, feeling, and action and to continually refresh your experience, viewing yourself and the world anew,” read the welcome letter from the dean of students. Sharon, who was in the master’s program in contemporary performance, had spent several years acting in community theatre in Miami, but she wasn’t sure where the work was leading. In her journal and notes, she assessed her flaws: she was “overly excitable”; her work could be “cheesy”; she was “not enough of a leader”; her sense of self was “defined by who wants me.”

She had grown up in a high-rise in a part of North Miami where people dress for the beach even when they are miles away. Her father, Tibor, an Israeli diamond dealer, had teased her on the rare occasions when she didn’t get all A’s. “You disturbed the straight line,” he told her. She went to a Jewish day school, where her drama teacher, Lillian Andron, described her as “Ms. Popularity, Ms. Congeniality.” Her nickname was Sharoni, and when she wrote it she dotted the “i” by sketching a tiny flower. She had thrived in a culture that by her mid-twenties she saw as shallow and spiritually arid.

Benjamin Stuber, a classmate at Naropa, told me, “For the more ambitious, type-A students in the class—and I include Sharoni in that group—the spiritual side of Naropa kind of snuck up on us. I don’t think we expected to be as moved as we were.” The M.F.A. program existed, he said, at the intersection of postmodernism and Buddhism. “It was about saying, ‘We are going to kill off these old dualisms, like light and dark, good and bad, dirty and clean, and start to sit with things as they really are.’ ”

At Naropa, Sharon became self-conscious about the ways in which she had always used her strengths—charisma, warmth, an intuitive capacity to please—as crutches. She had once felt that the ingredients of a fulfilling life were fairly straightforward. “All I wanted is to be married to Todd and be a mother,” she said. But that path felt increasingly stale. She was working on “re-integrating, re-patterning, re-structuring,” she wrote to a high-school friend. In her school notebook, she instructed herself to “contemplate uncertainty” every morning. She wondered if she should project a quieter presence. “Maybe I have the need to talk so much in class and offer so much of my opinion because I don’t actually take the time to process things on my own,” she wrote. In the margins of “The Essential Chögyam Trungpa,” a book of teachings by the founder of Naropa, she wrote, “Can we practice meditation w/o being afraid of the foreignness?”

In her first semester, in 2007, she took a class with Katsura Kan, a guest artist at Naropa and one of the world’s most prominent choreographers and instructors of Butoh, a postmodern Japanese dance form. A sinewy, youthful fifty-nine-year-old with a shaved head, Kan was polite and somewhat remote. He had studied Zen Buddhism for three decades, and he gave clipped, heavily accented instructions that sounded like koans. “To seek the door to the neutral is to approach transformation,” he told the students. Stuber, in his notebook, wrote, “Butoh begins with the abandonment of self.”

Kan is based in Japan, where he studied with Tatsumi Hijikata, one of two choreographers credited with establishing Butoh as a distinct art form, in the nineteen-fifties. It was originally called ankoku butoh, the “dance of darkness.” Hijikata’s choreography was asymmetrical, erotic, and halting, requiring intense muscular control, and it often had an undertone of dread. In one of his most famous performances, “Story of Smallpox,” Hijikata appeared onstage hunched over, looking feeble and diseased. He made barely perceptible movements. The audience heard the sound of wind and the cawing of crows.

Hijikata, who was influenced by French Surrealism, taught his apprentices to understand Butoh as inseparable from daily life. According to the Butoh scholar Caitlin Coker, he and his students ate together—“There was even Butoh in eating a meal,” one dancer said—and he trained them to relinquish the idea of individual expression. One former apprentice, Waguri Yukio, said that Hijikata received phone calls from parents saying, “Give me back my daughter.” But Hijikata used to say, “The person who is kidnapped will become the most skilled.”

One of Sharon’s classmates said that he remembers the day that “Butoh suddenly made sense to her.” Kan asked the students to imagine that ants were crawling up their limbs and taking over their bodies, an exercise designed to help them find new vocabularies for physical expression. After the class, Sharon curled up on the floor and began crying. “Until then, it was as if there had only been this small corner of her own psychology that she felt comfortable with—the weather was always sunny there,” the classmate said. “In actor training, we think of that as blockage. But from then she stopped fighting it. She was willing to transform.”

At the end of the semester, Kan chose six students to perform a work he had choreographed. Like nearly all Butoh dances, the movement was slow, meditative, and quiet, close to the floor. The students wore white paint on their bodies and faces. Sharon performed a duet with Stuber, who recalled, “There was a lot of rolling and twisting, and our bodies kept going round and round like we were some sort of ball. It was about being in this place where identity is still mutable.” After the performance, he remembers, Todd Siegel told him, “I couldn’t tell which one of you was my wife.”

For her thesis project, Sharon decided to create a Butoh-inspired piece “about the road to emptiness,” as she described it in her journal. She wanted to work on “entering the darker places of myself, fearlessly.” She asked Kan for guidance on Buddhist views of aging, disease, and death. “I want to have a serious conversation with you about this,” she told him.

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Stuber said that it wouldn’t have surprised him if Sharon had developed a crush on Kan. “I had a little crush on him, too,” he said. “We talked a lot about mentorship in the arts, about transference and counter-transference.” He was impressed by Sharon’s openness to new experience, which, he said, reminded him of the “tender heart of the warrior” that Chögyam Trungpa, Naropa’s founder, describes in one of his teachings. “The strongest warrior is not the one who wears layers of armor,” Stuber said, “but the one who puts down her sword and shield, takes off her armor, and opens her heart—she is the brave one.”

All artistic mentorship requires a certain level of devotion and imitation, but in choreography the influence tends to be more literal. One body is taking direction from another. The critic André Lepecki describes choreography as “a body snatcher.” The dancer, he writes, is “nothing more than a faithful executor of the designs of the absent, remote, perhaps dead, yet haunting power of the master’s will.”