Eternity 123 is the third instalment of a feminist dance triptych choreographed and performed by Vangeline (Elsewhere–2018, Erasure–2019, and Eternity 123) and hosted by the Humanities Cultural Programme.
Eternity 123 traces the symbolic journey of women's liberation across time. With this piece, Vangeline also celebrates the impact of women on the art form butoh, exploring the link between women, butoh, and “cabaret.” ‘In the 70s and 80s, women butoh dancers danced in “cabarets” to make a living in Tokyo”, says Vangeline. “This history has led to unique methods and contributions by women in our field–contributions that have typically been overlooked. In the 1990s, I also made a living in New York as a go go/burlesque/vaudeville dancer. In this piece, I celebrate women trailblazers while playfully exploring these layers of history.”
Eternity 123 will be performed in the UK for the first time in March 2023, alongside the ‘Missing Bodies, Missing Voices: Ordinary Lives and the Reframing of 'Postwar Japan' hosted at the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies, Oxford. The performance is hosted in collaboration with and funded by the Humanities Cultural Programme, curated by Alice Baldock (University of Oxford) and performed and choreographed by Vangeline (New York Butoh Institute/ Vangeline Theater). The hour-long performance will be followed by a discussion led by Dr. Fusako Innami (Associate Professor, Durham University) and Alice Baldock (DPhil candidate, University of Oxford).
Location: The Old Fire Station, 40 George Street, Oxford
Date and time: 11th March 2023, 6 - 8pm. (6-7 pm Butoh performance; 7-8 pm Q&A with discussants).
Tickets: Please click here to book your tickets. Tickets are free, but booking is essential to attend.
Vangeline is a teacher, dancer, and choreographer specializing in Japanese butoh. She is the artistic director of the Vangeline Theater/New York Butoh Institute (New York), a dance company firmly rooted in the tradition of Japanese butoh while carrying it into the twenty-first century. With her all-female dance company, Vangeline’s socially conscious performances tie together butoh and activism. Vangeline is the founder of the New York Butoh Institute Festival, which elevates the visibility of women in butoh, and the festival Queer Butoh. She pioneered the award-winning, 15-year running program The Dream a Dream Project, which brings butoh dance to incarcerated men and women at correctional facilities across New York State. Her choreographed work has been performed in Chile, Hong Kong, Germany, Denmark, France, the UK, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
Fusako Innami is an associate professor in Japanese and Performance Studies at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University, as well as the author of Touching the Unreachable: Writing, Skinship, Modern Japan (2021). She has published works on the body and its senses, intimacy, and sleep, and she has long contributed to articles on the performing arts. Her current project engages with embodied performance practices as transcultural interactions and collaborations that have advanced our understanding of phenomenal bodies. Concurrently, she is running a series of dance workshops, Touch: Migrating Embodiedness, which will culminate in a performance in Japan in the summer of 2023, to translate literary touch back to moving bodies.
Alice Baldock is a DPhil Researcher in History at the University of Oxford, studying the lives and ideas of women dancers in post-war Japan. The focus of her doctoral thesis is intellectual views of these dancers on the concept of body and movement, and how these views allowed dancers to reframe post-war Japanese society in a way that allowed them to live more authentically in a world that was becoming increasingly codified and consumerist. Her recent publications include ‘Body (of) Knowledge: Women, the Body, and Dance in Twentieth Century Japan’ (Journal of Asian Studies, January 2022), and the forward to Vangeline’s first book, Cradling Empty Space (2020). Alice also has a creative practice, with recent work including a solo piece in butoh company Mutekisha’s ‘The Body without the Border’ (July 2022). She is also interested in integrating performing arts and humanities into a useful dialogue, and has previously collaborated with the Humanities Cultural Programme and butoh company Café Reason on the project ‘Breaking Free: A Symposium on the Dancing Body’, which combined creative practice, discussion, and writing to interrogate various ideas that form our lived experiences of our bodies.
Watch the Trailer for Eternity123:
