Conan Amok's arresting butoh solo The Folds redefines "virtuosity" at VIDF to March 9

Alumnus of Japan’s acclaimed Dairakudakan takes a physically stunning journey through death and consciousness

By Janet Smith

The Folds. Photos by Tamás Márkos

Vancouver International Dance Festival presents The Folds at the Annex until March 9

BUTOH FANS WHO caught the near-legendary shows by Japan’s Dairakudakan at the Vancouver International Dance Festival in 2017 and 2019 will want to head down to the Annex theatre tonight through Saturday.

That’s because Conan Amok, who trained 11 years at the company under butoh master (and Kill Bill cameo star) Akaji Maro, is performing his eerily arresting solo The Folds in the intimate, darkened space. Sit close to the front to absorb its full haunting power.

Amok is able to isolate every muscle and sinew, twisting, contorting, and transforming from something alien and demonic one moment, and vulnerably human the next. It’s a performance of intense physicality that pushes all your contemporary-dance ideas around what defines “virtuosity”—the movement being so distorted and grotesque it’s easy to forget the extreme technical skill of this committed performer. It also challenges your notions of time, space, consciousness, and mortality. Yes: The Folds is a trip.

The show is best described as witnessing a corpse reanimating itself, time and again, into new forms, before collapsing again—fingers gnarled into fists, limbs stiffening in rigor mortis. (Butoh is, after all, a sort of dance of death.) The artist first appears out of a void of darkness like a ghost, caked in Butoh’s traditional white makeup so that his face resembles a death mask, and wearing a freaky long, purple wig. Eventually it, and his white gauzy gown come off, the artist later marking himself in gushes and streaks of black paint. The music is an electronic frenzy whose only respite comes when Amok veils himself in a gauzy central curtain and the strains turn, for a brief moment of grace, to elegant Baroque.

It's a strange and bracing hour, and a feat of physicality you won't soon forget. The Folds is like a living, breathing nightmare, a journey into the beyond with a performer who's unafraid to go there.  

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