Butoh-A-Go-Go at ROMP!
Avant-garde dancers perform In the Red
by Reanna Alder
Butoh is a contemporary Japanese avant-garde art form.

Despite a less-than-half-capacity crowd at Metro Studio for their one-night-only performance of In The Red, Vancouver's Butoh-A-Go-Go received one of the loudest and longest rounds of applause in the three-day ROMP! Festival of Independent Dance.

The two dancers, Thomas Anfield and Kevin Bergsma, maintained a fierce, glacial intensity throughout the 55-minute performance. Wearing tattered red robes and sumo-style loincloths over a full coat of white body makeup, the performers' movements suggested a series of primal states, often dictated by changes in the soundscape. To the sound of water, they began shivering violently. Physically isolated from each other across the stage, eventually, almost accidentally, they moved as if they sought warmth and the relief of shared suffering. The sound then shifted to children playing. Back to back, they groped for each other's hands overhead with shy determination.

The dancers used their facial expressions as purposefully as their limbs, whether contorted into masks of agony, curiosity, vanity or demonic glee. The movements were supple, almost liquid. The creases of bellies and bums often peeked through tears in the robes.

Butoh is a contemporary Japanese avant-garde art form that emerged after the Second World War. Like Zen Buddhism, it is fascinated with suffering. It may be described as theatrical and meditative, playful and grotesque.

Whether evoking the preening male beauty of a Greek statuary, the prostrated, broken bodies of slaves, the movement of snails, or the frightening cheer of dashboard dolls, Anfield and Bergsma demonstrated the intimacy of performers who have developed absolute trust in their partnership.

At times, however, the dancers' behavioural shifts seemed too directly triggered by the music, as though they had become so engrossed that they missed a cue. And as is so often the case, the audience would have been left eager and wanting more if the show had been 10 minutes shorter.

In one sequence, the dancers made a slow, flailing, prostrated march across the stage. They left a wide trail of white body paint across the black floor, the prints of articulate feet, hands, heads and shoulders where they met the stage. This, and the sweat dripping from the performers' brows, was the only physical trace of Anfield and Bergsma's theatrical journey at the end of the evening.

In The Red was a performance of rare depth and integrity, though not to everyone's taste. It was perhaps a mistake to schedule it as the festival opener. Though other shows played to fuller crowds, after In the Red everything else looked too comfortable, too pretty. Nothing else measured up in terms of sheer commitment to each moment of dance.