‘Homage’ Paints Powerful Butoh Picture

A former member of Min Tanaka’s celebrated Mai Juku company in Japan, French dancer-choreographer Christine Quoiraud-Levresse used the unsparing concentration and intensity of butoh in an unusually selfless manner during a solo program titled “Principle of Uncertainty: Homage to Magritte” at La Boca downtown on Sunday.

Working in narrow shafts of light extending from the audience to the back wall, she resourcefully evoked the isolated body parts and disturbing foreground-and-background juxtapositions that dominate the paintings of Belgian Surrealist Rene Magritte.

Magritte liked detached hands floating in space and, in her long-sleeved black dress, Quoiraud-Levresse turned the idea into a potent gestural cadenza hovering in near-darkness. She also made light itself the defining force of her program, sometimes barely intruding on it, sometimes fully revealed by it, but always subservient to its changing contours, intensities and projected imagery.

In stark white makeup, and restlessly bending, twisting and reaching in textbook butoh cycles of mutability, she could look monstrous when close to the audience (her huge shadow taking up the entire back wall) or dangerously frail when huddled against a far window under giant slide projections of dangling hands and feet.

Atmospheric woodwind and seed-tube sonorities by Philippe Levresse accompanied her, with the music ranging from neo-Baroque formalism to haunting melodies suggesting Auvergne-style folk songs. An evening full of the kind of secret metaphor that Magritte exalted.