Butoh Reframed

Amélie Ravalec is a London-based French film director and producer, photographer, publisher and colourist. Her internationally screened films include Art & Mind, Paris/Berlin: 20 Years Of Underground Techno and Industrial Soundtrack For the Urban Decay.

Paul Michael Henry is an Irish/Scottish dancer, musician and film maker based in Glasgow. He has performed internationally, and is artistic director of UNFIX festival.

Most recently, Ravalec collaborated with Henry on her forthcoming film, Sumarsólstöður. Fjord Review caught up with them both to find out more about the film, and how their respective disciplines have merged.

Film still: Paul Michael Henry in Sumarsólstöður, directed by Amélie Ravalec

What was your first introduction to Butoh?

Amélie Ravalec: I first discovered Butoh in 2009, through a techno music video that featured footage of performances by Butoh dancer Imre Thormann. I was instantly blown away by what I saw, I didn’t see it as dance so much as an exploration of darkness and the human body that went beyond words, a form of impact that felt incredibly powerful.

My interest in Butoh grew over the years, and in 2019, I started directing a documentary on the Japanese avant-garde of the 1960s. In the film, I feature Butoh founders Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo, and their collaborations with photographers such as Hosoe Eikoh. I got to interview Butoh archivists Mizohata Toshio (Dance Archive Network) and Morishita Takashi (Hijikata Tatsumi archive) and to discover their rich archives which contain hundreds of photographs of their performances. My film Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers is now completed and will be released worldwide in 2025 in selected cinemas, museums and festivals.

Please tell me more about the forthcoming film Sumarsólstöður?

Sumarsólstöður is my first work of fiction—I’ll include the synopsis and trailer below. It has been quite a crazy adventure. I first started thinking about it in 2022—after the long years of the pandemic, I was itching to challenge myself and work on something new. I had this recurring vision in my head of two black-cloaked fencers fighting on a glacier in Iceland with redhead women surrounding them. So, five weeks later, I was in Iceland shooting it.

We then developed the story furthe—I have been writing the script with my father Vincent Ravalec who is a writer and a screenwriter. A year later, we went to Japan to shoot. Again, I had these visions of several different characters—a mounted archer / Samurai and his horses, a Kinbaku rope master, a 90-year-old sorcerer in the mountains . . .

This is my first fiction film, so there have been many challenges, as I also didn’t choose the easiest story to start! But it has been incredibly exciting and mentally fulfilling to develop and try something new in my work. I now have a completed 30 min short film pilot that will hit the festivals in 2025, and we are aiming to develop it into a long-form series. I have so many ideas I want to develop with this, and I can’t wait to push it further.

How do you initially approach film making, where dance is involved? Do you start in visual terms/ storyboarding etc or from a dance performance, or piece of text?

I usually have quite a precise vision in my head. I think visually so I always picture what I want to achieve. The challenge is to then translate my ideas into something that the dancers can understand. So far, I have collaborated with Butoh dancers from Japan, Taiwan, Italy, Scotland and the UK. The approach has been different every time. For my first dance film, BUTŌ: The Recurring Torments of the Pugilist, I did quite a detailed storyboard and mood board with images and descriptions of the movements I wanted. For another short film, The Amorphous Man-Statue, it started from a concept where I pictured a man-statue coming to life after centuries in a garden of monsters. I explained the concept to my dancer Donato Simone who then improvised a wonderful dance and spoken-word performance.

Film still: Paul Michael Henry in Sumarsólstöður, directed by Amélie Ravalec

How was it working with Paul Michael Henry? He's a wonderful performer.

It was very rewarding working with Michael. I put a call out looking for a dancer and received many emails, but when I looked at his video, I knew in seconds that I’d be working with him. It’s always quite instant for me, I know whether someone is going to work or not. It’s not so much related to their own work, previous experience or technical ability, it’s much more instinctual than that, you can feel whether or not the chemistry is there.

When I planned to shoot in Iceland for example, I wasn’t initially looking for a dancer, but I saw one headshot of this Japanese dancer on the Iceland Dance Company website and I instantly knew I had to work with him—I did and he was amazing.

Shooting Michael was very exciting, not only is he a brilliant and expressive dance performer, but he’s also very good at acting and has an incredible presence on camera. We shot a scene in an abandoned cemetery in London, a rope-based performance on a mediaeval chair, and a performance with two Friesian black stallions.

One of my favourite shots is Michael moving in sync with Thor, one of the stallions, both of them performing a metronomic movement in complete harmony. I felt so excited shooting it as it truly felt like a special moment, capturing that rare and magic instinctual connection between two different species.

Looking back on what I shot, it’s also very interesting to see Michael’s range of emotions captured on camera. He's very expressive and manages to convey a lot in his performance with quite an economy of movement, which I like. He also has the most wonderful voice and Scottish accent.

When I’m shooting, I’m so focused on handling everything and getting the shot that I don’t really get to appreciate the performance until reviewing it later, so it’s always a relief to find out it turned out as you expected.

What, if any, are the challenges in framing dance on screen?

I think what initially got me interested in photographing and filming Butoh dancers is that I haven’t actually seen any live performances of any of my favourite Japanese performers, and there aren’t that many archival films of their work, so I had to imagine their performances based on the photographic testimony that exists. A photograph can be such a tantalising glimpse into another world and it always sparks my imagination.

I’m fascinated with capturing the Body in movement, and particularly the bodies of athletes and dancers. For me, filming is motion, I’m actually incapable of standing still while I shoot. I find filming on a tripod, for example, very difficult, so I always leave these shots to my other camera operator if I have one with me. I love moving around my performer, getting different angles, whether it’s getting right on top or underneath them, circling them, or focusing on one part of their body only. That’s how I personally enjoy their performances. I don’t often watch dance shows as I find it very difficult to appreciate a performance from sitting in a chair.

The environment in which they perform is also crucial to me, I wouldn’t be able to shoot in a location that doesn’t inspire me. Some of the locations I have shot with my dancers include a volcanic black sand beach at the bottom of an Icelandic glacier, an abandoned UFO house in Taiwan, a Renaissance garden of monster statues in Italy . . . these always become part of the story, so I always find my performer and location before I develop my ideas and concept further.

Film still: Paul Michael Henry in Sumarsólstöður, directed by Amélie Ravalec

How did you initially get into performing Butoh?

Paul Michael Henry: Butoh found me. It feels that way. I was a musician in my twenties at a dead end and in dreadful mental health, and I had a suspicion that my body might have some life and vibrancy that my thinking mind was failing to locate. I started exploring ritual theatre with a brilliant guy called Antero Alli, but he was miles away from Scotland where I live. Then Butoh started seducing me from different angles, though I'd never heard of it – friends would mention it, I saw it depicted on gig posters, that kind of thing. Finally in a coffee shop I saw a sign saying “Butoh Dance—Monday night.” I did one class with my now friend Yuri Dini and everything changed for me. I pursued it obsessively after that, though I still performed mainly as a musician who would shyly dance for a few moments for the next few years. After around four years or so I made my first solo and have been going deeper ever since.

Tell me a little bit more about your character in the film please?

This is a question for Amélie really in that we deliberately kept me somewhat in the dark. At first all I knew was that I was going to London to dance with horses on film (enough of a carrot for me to show up!). She sent me a script one day before filming I think, with some background on the character; a dancer who has been tuning into these signals and frequencies that seem to harbinger a way for humanity to escape its stupid fate.

It was fascinating for me to be directed like that, saying words I had no hand in creating and trusting Amélie and the crew to tell me what was working. I'd love to do more of it to be honest.

How was the experience of working with Amelie?

Fucking brilliant. It's strange that we hadn't encountered each other before as Butoh is a pretty small world, but it's nice that I've found a director with visions and skill sets I don't have, and a new couch to crash on in London. I'm hoping we'll do more together at some point. I'm most often the instigator of the art I make, so it's a relief and a learning experience to work for someone who has a strong vision and just obey them, my only job being to bring whatever gifts I have to what she's trying to realise.

You've filmed in Japan before. Any more plans to return and work there?

I'm always scheming to get back to Japan (the last time was the beginning of 2023). At the moment it's the opposite in that I'll hopefully be bringing my Butoh teachers Seisaku and Yuri to Glasgow in 2025, but I've been speaking to friends over there about some possible projects. It's always and boringly about funding, but I'll figure it out soon hopefully.

Lorna Irvine

Based in Glasgow, Lorna was delightfully corrupted by the work of Michael Clark in her early teens, and has never looked back. Passionate about dance, music, and theatre she writes regularly for the List, Across the Arts and Exeunt. She also wrote on dance, drama and whatever particular obsession she had that week for the Shimmy, the Skinny and TLG and has contributed to Mslexia, TYCI and the Vile Blog.

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