Masculine Feminine Vangeline

 MAN WOMAN 
Directed, choreographed, and performed by Vangeline
Costumes by Machine Dazzle
Music by Ray Barragan Sweeten
Lighting by Ayumu "Poe" Saegusa
LaMama Moves! Festival at LaMama Experimental Theater, New York
April 18, 2026

-- By Tom Phillips 

Butoh artiste Vangeline continues to amaze and delight.  Last year she was synching brain waves with a male Japanese dancer in a piece (which I didn’t see) called Man/Woman. This year she has dispensed with punctuation and partner, and become a complete being —male and female, animal, vegetable and mineral, down to earth and out of time. She calls it Man Woman.

This world premiere began with an image of woman weighed down with the colossal couture of a male-dominated world. All that’s visible of her is a pretty face encased in an enormous wad of robes, ruffles, and feathers – a trophy queen topped with a fanned-out black cockade, imprisoned by imperial edict. Left alone, she wrinkles her nose, puckers her chin – then discovers her hands amid the feathers, and tortuously works herself free, limb by limb.

Vangeline's Story

 -- By Tom Phillips 

"The Slowest Wave"  Photo by Michael Blase 

Butoh began in the ruins of post-war Japan as the "dance of utter darkness."  Today it is performed and taught all over the world, and increasingly influential in other techniques and styles. 

No one is more responsible for this than Vangeline, founder and director of the New York Butoh Institute, which marks its 20th anniversary in 2023. After many years on the margins of the dance world, this year she is flooded in fellowships – including a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to study the brain waves of Butoh dancers.     

Vangeline was born in 1970 in France, and came to New York in 1992. She told us her life story recently while sitting and stretching on the floor of her dance studio, near the banks of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn.

TP:  What was your reason for coming to New York at age 22?   

Vangeline:  I came to do an internship at the UN — a diplomatic visa, all the doors were open, red carpet.  Then two months into it I decided to quit and just become a dancer, to my parents’ great chagrin!  I lost my visa, I lost my status, and I became an underground performer.  So that was my switch, my commitment, my landing into New York and saying No – this is the life I’m going to lead.  And I followed my path kind of stubbornly ever since.   

Womanspreading: Butoh Redefined

Vangeline 
"Eternity 123" 
Triskelion Arts, Brooklyn 
October 30, 2021

 --  By Tom Phillips 

Butoh queen Vangeline describes her solo "Eternity 123" as a "symbolic journey of women's liberation across time."  I tossed the program note aside and watched the show with an open mind, with which the artist proceeded to play.   

The piece begins with nothing but a dress -- a full-length, frilly see-through chiffon -- draped over a slip, revolving in the air.  In time the dancer appears behind it as a pair of feet and two sets of fiddling fingers, and proceeds to inhabit the garment.  

This is woman as clothes hanger -- seen but not heard, seen but not seen. Blackout.  

The next scene has the dancer wearing the dress, to the second movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. Facing rear, she does nothing but turn her head into profile, then back, moving imperceptibly over a span of eight minutes. The music, built on a single rhythmic motif, moves majestically through a minor march and a major fantasia, ending like a wave breaking over the rocks of some desolate shore. Vangeline's sound score adds birdsongs in the background.  By the middle of the movement I scribbled excitedly in my notebook Art, Nature, and Humanity--- and felt a half-forgotten sensation creeping up from my entrails.  Mesmerized by the beauty of that half-turned face, I was falling in love!  

This is woman as ideal, semi-paralyzed on a pedestal. Blackout, reset. 

To crowd noise and the strains of the Blue Danube Waltz, the next scene has the dancer again facing rear, but with the arms in motion, rising in a super slo-mo port de bras, then twining the fingers behind the neck, then down behind the back -- until voila! off slips the frilly vest, leaving the torso and arms in just a translucent slip.  Here's a hint of burlesque, a strip-tease --- woman as object, but a fleshly object, as real as any man.  Blackout.  

By this time I was feeling like Virginia Woolf's Orlando, morphing through centuries of changing gender roles -- ready for anything in the 21st.  

Bare-legged now and sprawled on the floor, a blob of wounded flesh, Vangeline appears helpless. Will she die?  The answer comes in a metamorphosis. She begins to move in jerks and spasms, face contorted as she works her jaws as if for the first time. Slowly and steadily, her strength and control increase as she extends her limbs, pushes herself up, then balances on her hips in a flying V-shape--- hands and feet in the air, body held in place by nothing but bands of abdominal steel. Finally, she takes a quarter-turn to face the audience, and eases her body into a symmetrical shape -- knees spread, toes touching on the floor, a perfect quadrangle below the waist, spine lifted above -- balanced in meditation, eyes open, living and breathing, meeting the gaze of the audience, equal and opposite. . 

You know "Manspreading?" This is Womanspreading.  And it's here to stay.  

Next up for "Eternity 123," a US tour.  It's E-Vangelism at its best. 

-- Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips 
Photos by Bryan Kwon 

Rites of Spring

-- By Tom Phillips  

Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance 

One problem in dealing with the world’s environmental crisis is that it’s composed of so many interrelated problems, most of them difficult to picture. Science does a lousy job of dramatizing climate change – so by the time people are forced to recognize it, their homes may be gone and their lives in danger.  And so it falls to the arts to show what business-as-usual is doing to us.  And Earth Day is an annual opportunity to seize the outdoor stage. 

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 

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.

Beyond Butoh

"Darkness Odyssey Part 2: I or Hallucination"
Kota Yamazaki/Fluid hug-hug
Baryshnikov Arts Center,  New York
December 14, 2017
--by Tom Phillips

Five dancers take part in Kota Yamazaki’s “Darkness Odyssey Part 2: I or Hallucination,” but for the most part each dances on his or her own, on a shiny floor, with a diaphanous rectangle of silver fabric hanging overhead.  The overall effect is of slow, liquid movement, but with fits and starts disrupting the surface calm.

  

Of the dancers Joanna Kotze commanded my attention most, stepping slowly like a long-legged wading bird, or like a child with autism, on tiptoes, whiffling her fingers under her chin and wrinkling her nose as if puzzling over an insoluble private riddle. At one point she spoke up to say she saw three power lines, or maybe it was four.

Raja Feather Kelly stood still with his mouth open for long periods. When he moved it was in long lines, opening into eccentric arabesques. Wearing a white shirt and blue pants, he rolled over with his back upright, so that his blue butt formed a dome over what looked like a featureless white face, and then began to talk animatedly with his hands. Later he lay down and said out loud that he smelled cigarette smoke, coming from next door. “Maybe it was hers?” he mused. This was the only mention of another person made by any character.  

Julian Barnett, wearing a black skirt over his pants and a diaphanous robe outside his shirt, pinched in on himself as if stuck in a contraction.  He stared and glared in stillness, then lurched around the space, moving spasmodically, as if he had something to say but couldn’t. 

Anarchy and Ash: Contemporary Dance from Asia

HAIGUFURU -- Ash is Falling

-- By Tom Phillips

After a one-year hiatus, Japan Society’s Contemporary Dance Showcase has returned, with a new look and a new theme.   When I first saw this showcase in 2005, dancers and choreographers were wrestling with issues like sexism, conformity, and office politics in Japan’s sclerotic traditional culture.  That seems like small potatoes now.  In the 2013 edition, we see artists surrounded by overwhelming forces, both natural and technological.  The 21st century has heaved into full view, and life as we know it is under siege.  What is to be done?