Irreversible Materiality | 2012

A collaboration with Green Candle Dance Company’s Senior Dancers. The project combines dance, photography and sound to create a unique visual language; influenced by Japanese avant-garde culture of the late 1960s – in particular Butoh, historically performed by older dancers.

Butoh is an avant-garde form of movement that first appeared in Japan following World War II; in the early 1960s, Tatsumi Hijikata coined the term ‘Anokoku-Buyou’ (dance of darkness) to describe his style of dance. Modern, western forms of dance and movement frequently focus on aspects and expressions of their own interpretations of beauty, where youth equals perfection. Butoh is anti-perfection – it is the imperfections that are considered beautiful.

These portraits of the dancers have been converted into audio files, then into spectrograms - the photograph’s tones and forms translated into multiple frequencies; this process mutates the performance into a Anokoku-Buyou, allowing the viewer to experience the images in an entirely new manner.

For further information, visit: irreversiblemateriality.wordpress.com | greencandledance.com