Review: Resonant Void, PBH’s Free Fringe @ Diggers Leith

If there were a Fringe award for most committed performance it would surely go to Joanna Rosenfeld, who several times during this Butoh solo, Resonant Void, exhausts herself to a point of muscle-quivering breathlessness like an Olympic athlete at the culmination of an intense burst of effort. She herself calls this the “weirdest performance at the Fringe” and while there is certainly stiff competition for that in a programme of over 4,000 shows, this is without doubt somewhere near the top. 

Butoh is a famously difficult dance to define; its founders resisted any sort of formalisation of the style. What we can say is that it emerged in the avant-garde scene of Japan in the 1950s and 1960s as a backlash against both Japanese and Western formalist techniques, seeking to subvert and challenge conventionality through grotesquerie, taboo, absurdism and play. Performances often feature long periods of stillness, slow motion, and ‘transmutation’ into other characters, beings or landscapes.

This performance begins with Rosenfeld inside in an egglike mesh structure (okay, it’s actually a pop-up mosquito netting, but suspend your disbelief) with projections of water dappling over it and a giant, ultra-thin plastic sheet draped behind. An original score devised by Keita Miyano is enhanced by Mhairi Campbell’s violin – various guest musicians of many different instruments and styles will be featured throughout the run, so you can return over and over and have a completely different experience each time. 

At first it seems as though nothing visible is happening, Rosenfeld is so still for so long, muscles straining with the effort. Then she begins exploring the surface of the mesh from within, stretching it to its limits, twisting and folding into an improbably small package on the floor. When she emerges, the feather-light plastic sheet becomes her dance partner as she makes it ripple, undulate and swirl around her. She uses light to great effect here, projecting onto and from behind the material in a way that fully explores the properties of it: transparency, heft, pliancy, fragility. You’ll never look at a stray wisp of plastic in the same way.

Black fabric skirts and wide-legged trousers undergo the same exploration of form, this time becoming mask-like aids to transform into non-human creatures. Rosenfeld’s body becomes a collection of shapes that, moved differently to human-shapes, transmute into something else entirely. 

The show finishes with a startling intensity which makes me wonder what the people who came in for a quiet afternoon pint in the bar think is happening in the little function room upstairs. This may not literally be the weirdest production at the Fringe, but it’s certainly a performance unlike any other – and exactly the kind of show which makes the Fringe so special.

Concept/Choreography: Joanna Rosenfeld
Original Ambient Music: Keita Miyano
Musician (18 August): Mhairi Campbell
Dramaturgy: Conan Amok
Developed at the Hijikata Archive, Saruhashi, under the supervision of Yuko Kawamoto, and in Nagoya under the care of Motoya Kondo.
Initially produced by Sanzen Camp, Tokyo, Japan.
Supported by The Authentic Artist Collective.

Resonant Void plays at PBH’s Free Fringe @ Diggers Leith until Sunday 30 August as part of EdFringe.