After an extended period during which I’ve been unable to perform, I welcome the opportunity to present a new work at the Occulture Conference in Berlin this Autumn. It has been four years since Visitation (Trans- States 2019); in that time we have gone through the collective trauma of the lockdown, and the acceleration of a technologically-driven abandonment of the carnal body. The ‘new body’ is constituted in a largely digital medium, going beyond the hybridity of organism and machine Donna Harraway identified in us, the cyborg. Resistance in the face of what appears as an inevitable loss of embodied knowledges, by preserving and fostering the techniques and arts of bodies in the world, is critical now.

For me this has also been a period of profound, unsettling change, of dramatic fluctuations in energy, mood and ability as my body undergoes perimenopause – I thought I would never perform again. When I felt at my nadir, I began to dance once more. There was nothing else. The transformation spells began to take shape in that moment.

transformation spells

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 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.

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I will also give a lecture on butô and my dance practice.

Dark dance
Eros, Illness and the Sacred

Butô – dark dance – belongs to the antinomian anti-tradition of dance (or anti-dance, as it has been called) that descends from Nietzsche. I begin this talk considering dance after Nietzsche – tracing the return of the archaic gods in Isadora Duncan’s unrestricted Hellenism and Nijinsky’s Faun and Rite of Spring, to the ecstatic dances of Mary Wigman and Anita Berber’s provocative eroticism. With butô’s first steps in the Japanese underground, Hijikata Tatsumi initiated a radical reappraisal of the body, drawing inspiration from this western anti-tradition and from his upbringing in the remote region of Tôhoku, inhabited by rice farmers and kami. Through his dances and writings, a convergence of eros, illness and the sacred emerges, themes which obsess and inform my own dance practice. Expanding on the potent creative tensions at play in the carnal body between illness, eroticism and the sacred in pursuit of an antinomian dance, I will close with my ‘testimony of a headless dancer,’ a call for a return to the occulted and carnal body as the source of renewal and living gnosis.

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The Occulture Conference is the leading event in Europe dedicated to an exploration of esoteric mysteries. The full line-up and tickets can be found at: https://occultureconference.com