EdFringe Review: R/evolution(s)

On a dark stage at Dance Base, Conan Amok’s R/evolution(s) reimagines butoh for the present without discarding its inheritance. Drawing on Amok’s years with Dairakudakan and his own “multi-layered body” method — shaped by butoh and sculptural practice — the 45-minute work explores revolution as both “orbital motion and radical change”. Four contemporary dancers (Moeka Nagata, Kaya Tsurumi, Mano Hatanaka, Yuki Matsukura) carry the form forward under deep bass, wadaiko drums and electronic pulses that shift from club-like intensity to something closer to atmospheric post-rock by the end. So writes Jonas Nölle for theQR.co.uk…

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The stage is stripped and severe: harsh lighting, sparse design, a quiet sculptural presence that gains importance only later. A minor technical glitch at the opening barely registers. There is no white corpse-paint like in traditional butoh. The aesthetic feels closer to a modern brutalist techno club than a 1960s underground ritual. Yet the vocabulary remains unmistakable — silent screams, contorted faces and limbs twisted as if by invisible strings, bodies oscillating between explosive energy and plant-like slowness so reduced that audience micro-movements sometimes seem louder than the dancers’.

Three structural phases emerge. The first is pure chaos: four figures thrown into a hostile physics, contorting, colliding, discovering what their bodies can and cannot do. It recalls a Heideggerian being-thrown-into-the-world, yet the emphasis is on becoming rather than mere presence — akin to reinforcement agents learning an unfamiliar environment. The mastery (or ‘un-mastering’ of traditional movement) is absolute; at moments the dancers appear to float, melt, or dissolve into multi-centred rhizomatic shapes that abandon the familiar human axes and forms.

From Embodied Chaos to Symbolic Transformation

In the second phase, the harshness softens. Symbolic language arrives — fragments of Mandarin, English, Japanese (“Where am I?”, “pelvis”) — and awareness shifts from purely embodied to symbolic. Thought can now be externalised. The final movement brings the most emotional moment: the dancers point, first at the audience, then at themselves. The indexical gesture completes the symbolic one; the boundary between self and other crystallises. Full-fleshed individuals have emerged.

Watching it feels like witnessing a parallel evolution — an alternative path the body in the mind and the mind in the body carve when ordinary coordinates are removed. Amok’s sculptural training is visible in the statuesque quality of the movement and in the way the choreography itself seems to shape and reshape the dancers as living material.

Butoh remains an acquired taste, closer to abstract physical theatre than conventional dance. For those willing to meet its demands, however, R/evolution(s) is richly rewarding: it pushes human bodies to rarely seen degrees of freedom and offers a lucid, contemporary reworking of a radical tradition. Amok and his collaborators let butoh evolve further in real time.

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