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Vangeline's Story

-- By Tom Phillips 

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.     

            Vangeline Theatre in "The Slowest Wave"  Photo: Michael Blase                         

LaMama Moves Online

LaMama Moves/Online 
Annabella Lenzu & Kari Hoaas 
January 20, 2021

By Tom Phillips 
Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips 

Inauguration Day and the Pandemic both played into the hands of artists at LaMama's annual festival of dance, this year on video instead of downtown in New York.  Norwegian choreographer Kari Hoaas and Argentine-American Annabella Lenzu had to adapt work originally meant for LaMama's theater space.  And while their creative solutions narrowed the scope of their pieces, they may also have sharpened their focus. 

                    Ida Haugen in "Rise" -- Photo: Marius Hauge 

Junk Dances 2020

"Plastic Harvest" 
Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance 
The Center at West Park, New York
Streamed Live December 15, 2020

by Tom Phillips 
copyright 2020 by Tom Phillips 

In the early 1960s, choreo- grapher Murray Louis took a ride up the escalator at Macy’s, the world’s largest store.

 ''I looked at rooms and rooms … waves of coats and shirts,'' he told the New York Times. ''I thought, 'Who buys this?' And suddenly I had an image of excess as a theme.''  Shortly after, Louis attended a country auction where he bought a bundle of old umbrellas. He opened them up: ''They were all completely eaten away. It was wonderful.”  He had one thought: “It all turns to junk.”  

Anika Hunter in "Plastic Harvest"

Isadorables

Lori Belilove and the Isadora Duncan Dance Company 
Lori Belilove, Artistic Director 
Hayley Rose, Emily D'Angelo, Faith Kimberling, Caroline Yamada 
Untermyer Gardens, Yonkers NY
September 26, 2020

By Tom Phillips 
-- Copyright 2020 by Tom Phillips 

A flock of Monarch butterflies –- stopping for the night in the Hudson Valley on their way to Mexico -- greeted early arrivals Saturday in Untermyer Park and Gardens, high above the river in Yonkers.  Their visit was unscheduled, but no more an accident than the gust of wind which an hour later lifted the silken wings of three dancers to Chopin’s “Butterfly Etude,” nor the shaft of light from the setting sun that illumined Gluck’s “Bacchanal.” Isadora planned it that way.  

Emily D'Angelo, Hayley Rose and Faith Kimberling in "Butterfly Etude." Photo: John Link

Unknown Dancer at Japan Society

"The Unknown Dancer in the Neighborhood"
Written and Directed by Suguru Yamamoto
Wataru Kitao, Performer 
Japan Society, New York 
January 10, 2020

-- By Tom Phillips 
Copyright 2020 by Tom Phillips 

                                       
Mayday! Mayday! Is a cry that comes up repeatedly in Suguru Yamamoto’s dance/drama “The Unknown Dancer in the Neighborhood.” It means “help me” in French, but it seems to fall on deaf ears in Tokyo, the setting for this theater piece by and for a new generation of Japanese artists. 

Despairing dramas about alienated people were a staple of the last century.  What makes this fresh is that it suggests alienation is only the other side of human community. We feel disconnected because we are connected.

Photograph by Ayumi Sakamoto

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
Copyright 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 bridge connecting those three cultures, and -- in the subversive, twisted way of Butoh -- an attack on each of them.

Photo: Michael Blase

The Love Suicides at Sonezaki

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

by Tom Phillips

copyright 2019 by Tom Phillips 

"The Love Suicides at Sonezaki," which opened Lincoln's Center's tenth annual White Light Festival, 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.

Where Butoh Lives

"Void and Vessel," "Mogari," "Hildergardis”
The New York Butoh Institute Festival 2019
Theater for the New City, New York
October 19, 2019

by Tom Phillips
copyright  2019 by Tom Phillips 

Butoh is an art form that rose from the ruins of the atom bombing of Japan -- an event that recalled the Big Bang at the beginning of time, and presaged the Resurrection of the Dead. Both 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 a perfect venue.

Biennial Buzz

2019 Whitney Biennial
Whitney Museum of American Art
New York, New York
May 14, 2019 

by Tom Phillips 
copyright 2019 by Tom Phillips 

Neck-deep in controversy even before it began, the 79th Whitney Biennial opened today –- organized by two adventurous young women, showcasing emerging artists and artists of color, many of them under 40 years old. Curators Jane Panetta and Ru Hockney set out to reflect the current American turmoil in both social and aesthetic issues. Their show delivers with a panoply of objects d’art from the purely beautiful to the politically explosive.

On the aesthetic end of the spectrum is a live installation by Brendan Fernandes called “The Master and Form,” which examines the relation of ballet to sculpture. This occupies a spacious room with props including a large jungle gym structure, used like a barre by a half-dozen well-trained New York ballet dancers. It’s a black leotard ballet without dancing, static poses rather than movement. More interesting for sculpture buffs than balletomanes, probably, but physically bracing and fun to walk around in. 

Photo by Tom Phillips

Beatledom without the Beat

Pepperland 
Mark Morris Dance Group 
Brooklyn Academy of Music 
Brooklyn, New York
May 11, 2019 

by Tom Phillips 
copyright 2019 by Tom Phillips 

Great artists know where they shouldn't go. George Balanchine, for example, never choreographed to Beethoven, because he said Beethoven's works  were complete in themselves, nothing to add. Mark Morris could have used that kind of discernment when he accepted a commission for a 50^th-anniversary tribute to the Beatles’ masterpiece “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” The resulting “Pepperland” is an uncharacteristically shallow work that does worse than add nothing. It subtracts much of the album's content, substituting original segments by composer Ethan Iverson that have only fleeting connections to the Beatles. Beyond that, the whole project completely misses the spirit and the style of "Sgt. Pepper." 

Photo: Mark Morris Dance Group in Pepperland. Photo by Mat Hayward.

Parable of the Plant Kingdom

"Estado Vegetal" 
Manuela Infante 
Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York 
May 3, 2019

by Tom Phillips 
copyright 2019 by Tom Phillips 

In medical Spanish, "Estado Vegetal" means a vegetative state, where basic life functions go on but consciousness and thought are absent. Politically, a "Vegetative State" could mean rule by the plant kingdom. This intense theatrical piece, starring a young Chilean woman and an array of potted plants, suggests such a state is exactly where humanity is headed.  

Photo: Estado Vegetal, by Maria Baranova.