En Trance

En Trance
Yumi Umiumare
Malthouse Theatre
27 August 2009
Tower Theatre, CUB Malthouse

En Trance is a gut-felt provocation of passion and emotion that re-defines our understanding of Butoh. If you’re already amazed by Yumi Umiumare’s extraordinary burlesque cabaret, her first solo show cannot be missed.

As words are almost redundant in a Butoh performance, it’s difficult to find enough of them to capture the experience. Perhaps it’s best not to try and understand, because it’s not about conscious thoughts and intellect. Leave logic at the door and just watch, listen and experience it with your instinct and those parts of you that make you feel without understanding why. The performers know what they have created; the audience are there to feel the results.

En Trance is a Butoh-inspired solo work where Umiumare’s extreme and controlled physicality flows from sublime to grotesque and from human to alien, as she takes us from the perceived chaos of a Tokyo street to the apparent serenity of an Australian river, and leaves us caught between unexplained joy and hints of despair.

Now established as a contemporary art form, Butoh developed in Japan in the 1950s and 1960s as a rejection of western ballet traditions and a subversion of traditional Japanese performance. My only experience of a Butoh class was in the 1980s where Nigel Kellaway made us stomp (‘toh’ means stomp in Japanese) for hours and reduce a Greek tragedy scene into a moment to repeat and re-create. Butoh doesn’t remove unnecessary expression, rather it takes the whole and distils it into something so pure and potent that it would be unpalatable if swallowed in one gulp. I was crap at it, but left beginning to understand how a performer’s physical connection to a space, a text and an experience can create that unexplainable visceral reaction for their audience.

Umiumare’s performance is physically and emotionally astonishing, and enhanced by a team of co-creators (Bambang Nurcahyadi – digital painting, Naomo Ota – design, Ian Kitney – sound , David Anderson – costume, Kerry Ireland – lighting and Moira Finucane – dramaturgy) whose individual perfection never distracts.

The only distracting element is sight line problems, so make sure you get in early and sit in the middle section.

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.

Photo by Jeff Busby.