QUEER BUTOH

The eighth annual Queer Butoh festival fit snugly at Brooklyn’s Brick Theater, affording audiences intimate proximity to a tradition that, amid its stylistic variety and formal elusiveness, is faithfully generated from deep internal sensations. Artistic Director Vangeline curated a program of female voices, each of which channeled their bodies into nonhuman forms, expanding typical notions of queerness as outlying human gender and sexual identities into one of universal fluidity.

SHADOWSWELL, consisting of Shuning Huang and Eilish Henderson, presented Garden of Ruin, fixating on cycles of rebirth. As the pair emerge from the floor, a video projection jumps briskly between bits of anatomical imagery in sepia tones. Most prevalent is a close examination of cocoons, situating the slight shifts of the movers as a kind of metamorphosis. For Huang and Henderson, this metamorphosis is made metaphorical in their gradual journey from separate to conjoined as they meet back-to-back, nestle their heads, and tangle their limbs. Their eventual stumbling apart, in turn, equally evokes the demise of a relationship, as well as the hope in cellular division eventually developing a complex organism.

Madelyn Sher choreographed Dandelions (or, the moment you realize the seasons have changed) for herself and Erica Lee Schwartz on the idea of a seed. The duet is structured like a perennial plant, cycling through three repetitions of movement that become more distinct with each iteration. Sher and Schwartz move with a more contemporary vocabulary that occasionally gets caught in tense, awkward postures that defy the elegance of their matching yellow dresses. A score of high-pitched vocals by Leo Hardman-Hill is manually stopped and restarted to signal each recurrence. By the third round, Sher and Schwartz end up in opposite roles,
suggesting a mutation in their cross-germination.

Anástasis closed the evening with Anima Transfiguratio, a meditation on the ubiquity of respiration in all organisms. She starts by taking the most captivatingly gradual rise to standing through a contracted crouch she manages to make look effortless. Wearing only cutoff tights, her entire body, painted in a dark, shimmering pigment, is exposed, in all its articulative splendor. Bypassing the anguish that often pervades Butoh performances, Anástasis keeps a serene expression as her musculature supply simmers between animalistic forms, with the softness of a bog body, but the stateliness of a kouros. She seems to become breath itself, drawing us in and setting us forth to partake in a protean lifeforce.

EYE ON THE ARTS, NY — Jonathan Matthews-Guzman