Klara K.

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Dance | Tanssi: Sofya Shaikut

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wandering through life her eyes

vengeful search for prey

revenge she seeks 

she’s made of spite 

 

scared scared of herself she screams 

and eats as a bird of prey

until she scares herself again and moves in circles 

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Butō’s animist features are well-known. But what is to bring a spirit back to life? Sofya Shaikut thinks it is to give shape to an essential quality, to a certain nature capable of creating a world. In this performance she metamorphoses into a yokai of accumulation and control, and the frustrated desire to escape it — a purely human yokai.

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Sofya Shaikut is a performative artist, choreographer, butō dancer and writer. Among her recent works is Phäeton, with Pere Ros (viola da gamba) presented at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid and a co-authored book Dionysus and Apollo after Nihilism published in Brill. Sofya’s dance is most influenced by Atsushi Takenouchi and Imre Thormann, though she has also studied butō at OddDance Theatre (with Natalia Zhestovskaya and Grigory Glazunov), at New Butoh School (with Sayoko Onishi), and has taken some classes with Katsura Kan, Ima Tenko, Yumiko Yoshioka and Marlène Jöbstl.

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