Vangeline in Hijikata Mon Amour at the New York Butoh Institute Festival 2019- Photo by Michael Blase
Hijikata Mon Amour continues to receive critical acclaim: Read this new, in-depth glowing review by Cindy Sibilsky for Broadway World.
Nov 11, 2019
Broadway World Review
"Hijikata Mon Amour"
Vangeline
NY Butoh Institute Festival 2019
Theater for the New City, New York
“For anyone who has the pleasure of watching Vangeline perform, that pretty much sums it up — it may be a difficult journey yet it is brilliant, and a challenging yet triumphant experience for both performer and viewer. Hijikata would have been proud.”
BWW Review: HIJIKATA MON AMOUR Honors A Trailblazer While Exploring the Future of Butoh.
Repost: for the 2019 Annual New York Butoh Institute Festival held at Theater for the New City dancer, teacher choreographer & curator (Vangeline) performed wearing a replica of the iconic ensemble butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata wore in his 1968 performance “Revolt of the Body”. The garment was recreated by Todd Thomas with lighting by Daniel kersh and sound design by Diwas Gurung.
Highlights: "On a personal level, to me, the piece represented the lineage: a student hears a teachers' voice and is forever changed by it," Vangeline described. "A butoh student must be lost to be found, walk in the dark, dive deeply inside themselves, and, as Tatsumi Hijikata said, 'pluck the darkness from their own flesh.' Butoh is a journey of self-discovery, of diving into our unconscious body memories," she extolled, "When we emerge, we still honor the teacher or lineage, but at some point, we must let the teacher go." ***
When reflecting upon the release of the teacher in order to come into one's own, Vangeline mused, "At the same time, the teacher is never really gone: as we let them go, they live on in our memory, which, in dance, means that they live in our body memory forever. To me, that is the journey of transmission of knowledge in butoh. The dead are never really dead in dance; by teaching the next generation, teachers can live forever in the bodies of the living. It is some kind of beautiful haunting.”
*** Please check out the full review (with a lot of fascinating historical context and insights from Vangeline on butoh for both the uninitiated as well as fans and practitioners alike) here: https://www.broadwayworld.com/bwwdance/article/BWW-Review-HIJIKATA-MON-AMOUR-Honors-A-Trailblazer-While-Exploring-the-Future-of-Butoh-20191111?fbclid=IwAR0ypgkWC5r25MZItyYgc2neFBS_YW2gKFqKYfqX-kf0syWZop7HCJCVoYw