Towards Practice via the Insistent Distraction of Butoh Dance

A testimonial to the major impact and importance of the work of Marie-Gabrielle Rotie on every aspect of artistic practice.

I will never forget the moment when, in 2001, as an undergrad in my first year, I stood in the small pristine gallery reserved for those working at the Master’s level and above at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and turned from my work to face the group of post-grads who would now crit my work, and lost myself completely.

Like slipping on wet moss, in an instant it happened, though I don’t think I clocked it at the moment. Though I certainly felt anxiety, elation, devastation, confusion, and a sense of profound loss during my 10-minute slot, it wasn’t until much later that I realized I was covered in mud and might have hit my head. We filed out of the gallery and onto the next installation.

There are a myriad of ways and reasons a person can get to this point. A multitude of paths lead, unwittingly, to this half-inhale tipping point – a point from which, sometimes, it feels as if there is no return. Often that last little push is only felt from the inside – the one doing the pushing has no idea they are offering a fatal blow.

My story before this point – what led me to this abrupt deletion of self – is a story for another time, and one I now know I’m using as a driving current in my work. But in the interstitial space of twenty-three years, there is a raging battle of silence, denial, and longing, now healed. How did I get there? How did I arrive from that place to this?

A series of circumstances had to gather, circumstances with enough seeming authority to congeal together as a higher truth: some unknowing mind of judgment that told me I was not enough, my work was not enough, I did not understand, I might never understand. And a door slammed silently. Through this thick blackness, I pushed on, but without the center-self, feet firmly planted, throwing out a wild vine in this direction or that, my practice a healthy octipical element lassoing its curiosities with infinitely reaching and extra-sticky appendages.

Instead, driven with pupils dilated, and a high, thrumming beat pulsing erratically against my breastbone – a bee trapped in a bottle surrounded by the color yellow but unable even to sound the word “buzz”, my practice struggled to raise its head. Eventually, walking sedately on the bottom of this jar, still a bee. Seventeen years I walked or curled or slept, six of which the only sign this furry body was alive a little twitch of my dry, unexercised lace-thin wings.

In 2020, life’s losses having imprinted upon my sleeping sense of self that only I could find me again, I took the lid off the jar and dumped my slowly animating body into the cold hands of the Royal College of Art in London.

I feel incredibly fortunate that we began on Zoom, and that it was with a safe remove from other students that I began the defibrillation of my practice. Beaming into my living room once a week was half the face of Jonathan Miles, his slowly gesturing hands unfolding truth over half-indecipherable truth as he stared down the lens and directly into my living room. His left eye, his long nose, his pleasing rounded pate all leaning toward me with languid urgency. Here is the language of painting. Here I can stop looking at self and start to wonder about the beyond-me.

It was in this place that I first encountered Butoh.

The dance of darkness, this set of bizarre and ‘unsocialized’ movements. As many people are when they see the art form, in my case, broadcast with the wrong zoom setting selected - “No, Jonathan, you have to reshare your screen, and when you do make sure the button called “share computer audio” is on…” – fragmenting the already ruptured concept of body, movement, dance, poetry even further – I was mesmerized.

Butoh is way outside my practice, I thought.

I can love it, but I don’t have a right to it. This goes to whose stories can we tell and cultural appropriation, I wrongly assumed. While suited ‘best for Japanese bodies’ it is a dance anyone can and should learn to perform. It pushes the unsayable and the unknowable through the exhausted cells of the body producing some seismic Other.

I do have a background in performance, but I’m trying to focus and teach myself what painting is and why I am doing it – Butoh is a distraction, my ADHD talking, is just another thing to pull me off the path I am fighting to believe I belong on.

And yet it showed up again. And again. And this visceral desire to understand from within the body happened.

Three years passed. I did not allow myself to buy books, do research, attend workshops. I avoided Butoh, which, one would think would not be a difficult thing to do. And yet, here is was again. I began to love it secretly. I went to the Abramovich take-over at the Southbank Center and sat for hours in a very small dressing room with artist Sandra Johnston and felt rivulets of nourishment begin to rush toward my practice. She was not performing Butoh, but its kin, her own language of temporal insanity.

I came back to feed at her excruciatingly slow, deeply felt, absolutely present feet more than once during that show, and, though we were building a black surround at my studio for an upcoming installation, the overlap of seeing Johnston, my secret and unrelenting attraction to Butoh, and the accidental black-box theater that came into being all collided to tell me one thing: I could do nothing else until I could understand Butoh in my body.

Butoh, like most things worth knowing, is a meditation that takes years to become proficient at, and only moments to touch. Like the new yoga student walking into a community class in a church basement, and taking, perhaps, the first conscious breath of their life, and finding it transformative does not instantly become full of all yogic knowledge, but does become wildly aware that there is something more – I knew it was time.

Knowing it was time made it urgent. I was a painter whose painting had left the building two years ago. Having graduated from the RCA as a Master in Painting, I was now in the land of installation again, a safer place, less freighted with the tyrannical history of paint itself.

A show, opening in three weeks.  A full-stop refusal to do any further work beyond radical acts of slow noticing which expressed itself performatively and the search for someone who would take me on as Butoh-ka – a novice – and let me eat greedily from the trough of ruptured movement.

Empty yourself, she told me, standing in the front gallery at RuptureXIBIT in South West London. The space was completely black, the cold October wind making the black concrete floor even colder. Glowing in the space were my finished and installed pods: amber paper creatures swimming through the becoming of embryonic darkness.

Once you are empty, hang your shining skull on the ceiling of infinity and just let your spine dangle, feel your coccyx at the end of that string, swaying in the cosmos. There is nothing. There is emptiness, but you are peopled with eyes, eyes all over the skin, eyes that can see into infinity, that don’t bother to see infinity, that see beyond. And on your body, a cloak, trailing behind you forever, and on that cloak, all of your ancestors, all wearing cloaks, trailing behind them. And you – empty and expanding in all directions.

That day, I learned to walk across the room, to rise like smoke, and to die like an evaporating cloud. All of these three actions together took three hours.

Let the text animate the body. Forests growing in the molar teeth. Slide your foot as though the floor is rice paper, and if you punch through it, infinity yawns beneath. It is not a fear, but a care.  A knowing you can walk here.

A thousand beetles flew out of my spine as my left hand turned to dust and blew away in the wind. The knees are trapped in a wall and compressing, and the breastbone is a flower turning toward the sun, and all of it at once.

There is no way to explain what Marie-Gabrielle Rotie, the extraordinary tutor who gave me her time, patience, and expertise that day did to my visual arts and writing practice – to the creative practice that is my life. But I shall try. This was only the first of what became many urgent appointments with her as I abandoned everything in search of understanding the act of trusting the concept will find its evidence in your body.

Weeks later, I began painting again. I don’t quite realize it is happening. The writing comes in waves and droves, 20,000 words at a time, the painting takes over the studio, I am fragmenting, I am performing with echoes of text rampaging through my body without warning. After a few sessions, it takes me twenty minutes to walk the thirty feet to the loo in my studio.

A few days later, the sun breaks over the rain-soaked plaza at Wimbledon station and a pigeon with a broken wing walks carefully by. I stop, I am with Olivia, another artist who works with me. “I need to make a dance,” I say, and she begins to film.

“These are unsocialized movements.” I hear in my mind as I pull my sweatshirt over my head – no one has to understand why they are happening, they aren’t for anyone, they are from somewhere else, the text of the broken wing, the glistening surface of the water running thickly down the shining pavement – they fill and animate me, and I cease to observe. At some point, a gentleman comes over to ask if I’m okay, do I need an ambulance. I’m yanked back through the astral plane and land only so far in my body that I can comprehend and respond.

I’m okay thanks. No thanks. I say, and he moves away as the last part of me able to animate reaches for a drop of honey, coming from a string in the sky – the bee of me clinging to life even as my body decays.

After this moment, I know that no matter what happens in my life, practice or art Butoh will be a part of it. I don’t aim to become a professional, a touring Butoh dancer, my body, having gone through cancers and surgeries and connective tissue disorders is not always strong enough to make it even through a group workshop with Marie-Gabrielle and her accomplice in reality-dissolving magic, Nick Parkins, who creates the alternate soundscape to this life which helps us all to let go into this other plane or place.

But encountering Marie-Gabrielle, working with her incredible capacity to meet each of her students exactly at the place where they need to be met, mining her encyclopedic knowledge of the form, and experiencing her tutelage privately and in workshops – it was the antidote to the moment in which I had lost myself so suddenly all those years ago.

Though I had been steadily working to reconstitute, gain mental and emotional health, to take back my practice, to understand it and formulate it, to give it legs, a scaffolding, a strong back, and a strong sense of self – it was not until I encountered Marie and worked with Marie that I understood finally what painting could be for me – was already for me.

My Ph.D. proposal, accepted by the University of Leeds, and my last show of a cycle of thirteen large oil paintings, entitled All of the Susannas were a direct consequence of the intersection of my life with the teaching life of Marie-Gabrielle Rotie and Nick Parkins.

For it was in this crossing that the final blow came, and the striving I was doing to turn practice toward my own subject and away from external validation freed me back into myself. At the same time, or perhaps as a function of this, I began to see that the fragmented self is the self, all selves, myself, and I began to coalesce.

Though I do not expect to transcend beyond Butoh-ka, I am content to continue training as a novice under Rotie, knowing that the feeding of my practice is essential, and this is the food of understanding.

This summer, I will be in residence at Orleans House in Twickenham, where I will build a new installation entitled the Templum. I am honored that Marie-Gabrielle will present a commissioned piece in the Templum, and to have Nick playing live as well, bringing Butoh to the wider community in a unique space, and offering an unusual environment for Marie-Gabrielle to expand her practice, and perhaps, even, to dance again herself.

Additionally, we are thrilled to be a part of Marie-Gabrielle’s important International Butoh Festival, taking place in November 2024 across several venues, including a whole studio takeover of RuptureXIBIT. In the Rupture space, twelve installation artists including myself will be transforming the studio spaces into new works, and each artist will be paired with a dancer who will be performing and responding to their space. Nick Parkins will be playing live during this event as well, in a new way: he will be at the center of the studio, watching all performers via CCTV, as they perform to his amplified sounds in their individual spaces. Like a spider conducting a disjointed symphony of fragmented attention, Rupture will come alive, presenting new opportunities for the generative.

I truly believe that the new comes only from the rubbing up against of two things that did not even know they had an affinity for each other, and that in this frictive event, the birth of the new is not always in the language of its impetus – Butoh is not my final form, I don’t believe, and yet my practice would not exist without it, or Marie-Gabrielle.