Butoh: Metamorphic Dance and Global Alchemy

15. Waking Woman

15 Waking Woman Lani Weissbach in Chicago (2006) In the process of creating an indigenous form of modern dance, Japanese butoh founders discovered a universal poetry of the body. Rather than transcending the human condition, butoh asks us to descend into it—down into the turbulence, awkwardness and uncertainty of life—and from there, deep in the thick of things, we discover our own healing and capacity to love unconditionally. —Lani Weissbach A violent and concentrated action is a kind of lyricism: it summons up supernatural images, a bloodstream of images, a bleeding spurt of images in the poet’s head and in the spectator’s as well. —Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double Imagine that your fears are mirrored back to you and ricochet out toward the world or, in the case of theater, toward the audience, and you will grasp the zero point of Lani Weissbach’s dance. In Waking Woman/Messy Beauty, she wrestles with fear and obsession: This is what comes to me now in the aftermath of her Chicago performance at Links Hall on March 18, 2006. Messy Beauty provides a vision of depth psychology in which purity vies with reality in bold imagination. The woman in this dance is a doll, or maybe two kinds of dolls, through which we glimpse a crushing struggle, sometimes draped in satin and at others bound in plastic. Hiding beneath her shiny pink gown, there are four fetish objects that control the performance: knife, doll, jeweled pouch, and shell. But I am getting ahead of myself. To enter the ma of Messy Beauty, imagine your need to cut through to something waiting on the other side of a paper house, and think of being perfect at the same time. The interest of this dance exists in the space between its slashing energy and its doll-like character. Lest we forget, 184 Essays and Poetry on Transformation Figure 25. Lani Weissbach dances Waking Woman/Messy Beauty (2006) in Chicago. Photograph by Rachel Finan, © 2006. Used by permission of Rachel Finan. a doll is not just a pretty girl; it is also a toy to be played with, an object of fascination to be controlled. Dolls don’t talk back, and they don’t bleed. They are always perfect, or perfectly what they are. They never change, unless they break apart and are reassembled. Why does Weissbach choose butoh as a way into “the doll”? Think of the little wooden Russian nesting dolls called matrioshkas. When you open them, inside there is a smaller doll, and inside this, a still smaller one, and so forth. They remind us of our relationship to things larger and smaller than we are, of replication , and of uncovering secrets. Butoh metamorphosis also bodes secrets, not reaching toward meaning but reaching toward transformation though hidden or mysterious movements. Butoh-ka dance in tumultuous places of struggle, not for the sake of struggle, but to trouble fear. Though often unstated, the way of butoh is to dance into fear, to dance until it yields, until finally it is named or bleeds—as in Waking Woman. What is this woman afraid of, I ask myself? From the beginning, her dance is quizzical. Cristal Sabbagh, Weissbach’s invisible double, sets the butoh in motion through a striking shadow dance behind a screen. At first we see only the screen and a vague shadow as we listen to a narrative by Daria Fand: One night, she dreamt something. Only, this was grander than a dream. When she woke up, she’d have to tell every sky if she were a cloud, every wall if she were a crack, every face if she were human. Waking Woman 185 The shadow stirs: It was worth an audience this time, but a language for it might not exist. Languages are like her, made up of bits. It’s so easy to get swept up among the bits, swept away with the cigarette butts and crumpled things left lying about on the sidewalk. The shadow agitates: And of course we thought it would, but what we don’t expect is the sudden emergence onstage of a glowing doll in a pink satin gown, replete with bouffant skirt. Nor do we expect her too-sweet shiny white mask or how the doll skitters so smoothly in wide swaths as though nothing could smudge or break her. The narrative over, the words...