BUTOH KA
(NOVICE DANCE)
“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…
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.
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…
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
- Excerpts of “Towards Practice via the Insistent Distraction of Butoh Dance” by Kate Howe. Click here to read more.
Fragments of Butoh Ka (Novice Dance) 23/24, Kate Howe under the tutelage of Marie-Gabrielle Rotie.
‘Pigeon with a broken wing and a thousand feet walking through the rain’
Kate Howe performs Butoh dance in front of Wimbledon Train Station, December 2023.
“It is so much like painting.
I am exhausted
Transported
Each part of my empty body was inhabited at the same time by different images - my
finger was an insect leg dancing on the edge of a piece of tissue paper, my ankle
bloomed like the moon.
I learned to hang my skull by a thread to the celing of infinity and let my spine dangle
beneath it, my empty body
A body of eyes and consciousness that takes in nothing but where the sky meets the
horizon and from this emptiness
Action
That bends time.
I leaned to rise like smoke and to decay back into the earth, sipping drops of liquid as I
clung, drinking life
I am blown apart. This is a way that the body reads a text. This is how language
transcends itself.
This is a mutable for me with no container but just enough foundational form to tie it
together.
The dance of darkness.”
-Kate Howe
‘Fidelity loss inevitable’
Butoh performance to Nick Parkin’s ‘Island of Dust’, inside (and in conversation with) ‘Instructions to the other from the Mother’ (WIP)
“In some relationship to the non-binary creatures of the Erotics of Power series, these beings enfleshed in the deep space of the black box theater in RuptureXIBIT. Maybe related, all of them bear a streak of blue. Are they communicating? Are the smaller ones attacking the bigger one? What is the relationship here? Some seem subverting, of shape, of pattern, of behavior. I’m not entirely sure they like being imprinted upon."…Read More
‘To Have Access to the Law’
Butoh Ka (Novice Dance), May 2024, Under the Tutelage of Marie-Gabrielle Rotie, music by Nick Parkin.
In March 2024, Judith Butler gave a lecture at CRMEP on Kafka's The Problem of our Laws. I then transcribed that talk, which I had attended, and wrote back to Butler via footnotes. Between the three of us, Kafka, Butler and I, we have exchanged over 75,000 words. The more interwoven we become as we pick apart the problem, the clearer the Problem becomes and the further the knowability of the law receeds. Now I am beyond writing, the text is writing me, but still, the law is unknowable.
This piece of Butoh-Ka is very much a beginning, just a quick sketch, I am a Butoh Novice under the tutelage of Marie-Gabrielle Rotie and this piece was performed improvisational to the live music of Nick Parkin at Goldsmiths, London as part of the culmination of a five-part workshop.
This is not really Butoh - because I am not a Butoh dancer, It takes years of training to become a Butoh dancer. But the form of Butoh weaves through all of my work, writing and visual art, and explains to me how it is to have an embodied life, one whose text writes the body, as Kafka has written me, with thanks to Butler.