Metempsychosis (2023) Performance: Handmade Costume, Bow, Arrows, Narration (20mins)

Commissioned by ‘Rebellious Bodies Butoh Festival’ funded by Arts Council England, Iklectik, London

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Named after the philosophical term for reincarnation, this performance offered an opportunity to consider Butoh’s anarchic embodiment within the energetic ecosystem of a living cosmos, as purported by a Gnostic Astrology. Presenting explicit parallels between the evolutionary implications of Gnostic Astrology and the cataclysmic histories that inspired Butoh’s founders to dance the wound of darkness, that remains a hidden cornerstone of our most honest humanity.

 

The performance was scored to a narration, that via the mythopoeic personhood of an animism, takes us from the big bang, to the birth of suns, as roving gods on quests to transform, through the formation of solar systems, as a spiral dance of deific archetypes, that incepted the advent of life on a world stage, ghost written by the patterned light of distant stars, to a history of mind that demands we dance our shadow home.