David Bellan on an avant-garde production based on an abandoned toy

Cafe Reason perform in the Butoh style of dance and physical theatre. It came into being in Japan in the late 1950s. Jeannie Donald-McKim talks about its origins.

“Butoh was like the punk-rock of dance. Its inventors came from the generation whose parents had fought in the war and lost. This humiliation caused their children to lose all trust in them and they wanted to move on to something new. In dance there were two main figureheads who started Butoh. One was an amazing guy called Kazuo Ohno. He died just a few years ago, and carried on dancing till he was a hundred and four! I saw him dancing when we was 89! He had actually been a soldier in the war.

“The other man, one of his students, was Tatsumi Hijikata, who started off as a ballet dancer. Ohno was Christian, and always danced with compassion. Hijikata was the dark side. He had an incredibly tough upbringing. His sisters were sold into prostitution, and his family were starving, and he really wanted to express that side of life.

It was considered very shocking when they started off, and they were both expelled from the Japanese Dance Association after the first performance. Butoh became really popular outside Japan, but in Japan it was a real subterranean, avant-garde movement.”

Jeannie studied Butoh in Japan for four years and I asked her whether there is a discernible Butoh style.

“Yes there is.There are definite forms. Hijikata invented his own vocabulary of dance movements. It was very original. He wanted people to dance like smoke and he had particular exercises that would give you that impression, so there are techniques. But it has developed. Everybody takes it in their own way, but for me it’s about exploring essential human experience. The actual form is not the thing, it’s trying to express the feelings in whatever way you can.

The inspiration for the new work, Dolls’ House, came in a very unexpected way.

“About three years ago a dolls’ house just appeared in our rehearsal space. It was a very beautiful, old, dilapidated 1930s dolls’ house, very dreamlike. No children used the place, and no one claimed it, so we were told we could keep it. Then, about six months later, a bag of costumes was found. It wasn’t ours, but it was exactly the same as the bag we use, and inside was a flyer for our company, and a whole load of costumes similar to ours. So that was given to us too.

“So things began to be a bit spooky. There was this dolls’ house and these costumes for characters, and we thought ‘they want us to perform their story – it’s a story that came to find us’. We start with a film of a young girl playing with a dolls’ house.

One member of the company was pregnant, so she’s in her house, which is like a dolls’ house, and then there’s dancer Ana Barbour in some ruins. Each dancer constructed a solo in response to this theme, and we have large group pieces which I choreographed, partly inspired by dreams. There are also dances choreographed by Ana Barbour and Paula Esposito, including a doll made up of four different people.”

Where and when
Dolls’ House 
Pegasus Theatre, tomorrow and Saturday
pegasustheatre.org.uk