Butoh a la Vangeline

"Hijikata Mon Amour"
Vangeline
NY Butoh Institute Festival 2019
Theater for the New City, New York
October 26, 2019

-- By Tom Phillips
                                               

Japan and France have long been yoked together by their mutual obsession with each others' elegant style. The US and Japan are connected forever by the atom bomb. "Hijikata Mon Amour" is a Triboro bridge connecting those three cultures, and -- in the subversive, twisted way of Butoh -- an attack on all of them.
                                         
                                                 Photo by Matthew Placek 

Puppet Love at Lincoln Center

Sonezaki Shinju (The Love Suicides at Sonezaki)
Sugimoto Bunraku Puppet Theater
Rose Theater, Lincoln Center, New York
October 19, 2019

-- By Tom Phillips                                                                                                                                                           

"The Love Suicides at Sonezaki," which opened Lincoln's Center's White Light Festival last night, tells the tale of a young Osaka shop clerk and a teenage prostitute, who kill themselves rather than face life apart. It was banned in Japan in 1723 after a wave of copycat love suicides, and not performed again until 1955. The US premiere of this production showed us nothing so much as the chasm between the worlds of 18th-century Japan and 21st-century America.

That said, tribute must be paid to the brilliance of these Japanese puppeteers, practicing an art unknown in the West. Disappearing inside black shrouds, they work in teams of two or three to manipulate half-size human forms around the stage. The puppets' faces and hands are immobile, so it is just with body language -- subtle movements of the limbs, head and torso -- that they show an astonishing range of emotions: erotic passion, anguish, anxiety, rage, indignation both phony and real, amazement, disappointment, despair, and on and on: there's nothing humans feel that these wooden figures can't express. 

Where Butoh Lives

-- By Tom Phillips

Melissa Lohman -- "Vessel and Void" 

Butoh is an art form that rose from the ruins of the atomic bombing of Japan -- an event that recalled the Big Bang at the beginning of time, and presaged the Resurrection of the Dead.   Both the beginning and the end were evoked last night at the second annual New York Butoh Institute Festival. 

This year’s festival features 14 performers – all female – from all over the world.  While Butoh is a Japanese art form, it lacks the strict formal traditions of Kabuki or Noh theatre. Instead it has a spirit, available to any culture that has survived destruction.  New York, which constantly destroys and rebuilds itself, is an ideal venue.

Melissa Lohman’s opening solo “Vessel and Void” was a New Yorker’s take on the Beginning – when a light shone in the darkness, and became flesh.  In an empty black space with a spotlight above, she lay white and prone on a what looked like a thick black duffel bag, over which she humped and crawled until she was seated on the floor and it was standing on its end like a thick black phallus.  Rising to her feet, showing mostly her back and sides, she made much of the body’s bilateral symmetry. The two columns of her back rose and fell independently like climbers on Jacob’s Ladder, to the sound of a single column of air, something like a Japanese bamboo flute. Her minimal script repeated the polarity of something and nothing – asking “what is this?” Toward the end her movements became more expansive and playful, and the score switched to what sounded like wind chimes – again columns of air but with a greater incidence of chance and play.  This was a creation story without a fall, a dance of mischief and joy. Bowing at the end, she patted her duffel like a fellow performer. Thanks, bro.