Living flesh has the power to transform, to create and recreate itself; from the moment of conception, before even the contours of a self emerge, this power is movement. The potential of transformation is intertwined with our vulnerability, our passibility, to undergo ordeals or ecstasies that transfigure us. Of this passibility Michel Henry wrote, ‘In the depths of its Night, our flesh is god.’ My dance is born in this Night, in encounter with the unknown, alien and holy.

In the choreographic sequence of transformation spells – natura and secunda creatura – I explore the frisson and tensions between becoming and being, fusing my fascination with the Utterances or Spells of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, particularly those explicitly concerned with the transformation of the deceased (76–88), with my foundation in the philosophy and methodologies of butô. Of these, butô-fu (the dance notation or score) – compositions of images and words that affect the dancer’s imaginal to effect bodily transformations and movement – function similarly to the hieroglyphic Utterances.