“Resonant Void” Lantern Theatre, Brighton

“This is not a performance about the body. This is a performance where the body begins to come apart.”

Trauma into dance is Rosenfeld’s signature. No wonder she was intrigued by Butoh. She writes: “Butoh emerged in Japan in the late 1950s through artists such as Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, partly as a response to both Western dance forms and the trauma and instability of postwar Japan. It is often described as an avant-garde dance theatre, but for me Butoh is less a fixed form and more a practice of transformation, atmosphere, and deep listening.”

Rosenfeld doesn’t add her body coming apart is also intentionally very funny as well as tragic. Nothing can quite escape her smile; even in grief and mourning.

Unlike most Western ballet and dance, Butoh’s not enacting a linear story, though the tripartite structure here begs that question. Using materials, Rosenfeld with dramaturg Conan Amok crafts a visually threefold experience. She refracts herself through the medium of opacity and occasionally transparency to the gentle yet disturbed pulse of Keita Miyano’s ambient music. Using differing light to sculpt the fluid extension of her body these plastics and fabric lend, she shifts surfaces and extends the making strange: what confronts us is the thingness of difference, a gesturally human form cradles within an amniotic sac, green and stripe-lit like an axylotl or turtle, or a life-form recessed in aquatic amoeba form. Alternatively she pulses with a pupating liveness – and other life is suggested in some of the few concrete gestures later on.

Rosenfeld has learned her craft seriously in her Japanese residences recently: though it’s recognizably a spiral heightening of the art she first showed (to this writer) back in 2015. It stretches further back still, to at least 2001, according to some seasoned Rosenfeld-goers.

Choreography is here creative, not virtuosic. Steps in any recognizable sense are banished. There’s a fluidity of gesture from image to image, and these in themselves expand as numinous, unnameable things. The resonance is less empty than inviting the void of projection. In other words imagining; that shared subjectivity transmitted uniquely from artist to audience. One precisely notated subjectivity is transmitted directly without objective intercession straight into the pictorial imaginings of the watcher. Their own memories create a narrative as each attempts a coherence of what they’ve seen. We’re storytelling creatures, memory orders that coherence. Rosenfeld plays with its scalloped edges.

The most confined sequence is the first, Rosenfeld crouched foetally in a mosquito-net, played over gently by varying shades of blue and other lighting. It’s a world of becoming and not becoming: a body almost being said. Rosenfeld often rolls around in the throb of its balling rhythms. Next, vertically, Rosenfeld gestures behind a plastic screen, shadowing herself, in a sequence of self and other, perhaps the full life of becoming and never quite arriving. Or indeed life as socialised prison. You watch catching not the person but the breaths of a trapped soul, as a shadow advances and recedes. Till a sudden punch-through out of existential rage and frustration punctures illusion. It’s here that Rosenfeld is most obscured and yet physically freest to enact that obliquity: she’s not encased in anything but a skirt.

The third though is its polar opposite. Emerging with a crone-cloak of black, Rosenfeld flays it around herself. Like a kind of Death or Fate, she thunders against her self-creation. Yeats’ late (1934) lines: “Now his wars on god begin/At stroke of midnight God shall win” from ‘The Four Ages of Man’ floated into this writer’s mind. Another observer referenced Dylan Thomas’s “rage against the dying of the light” in his late villanelle from1952 about his dying father; and there’s both and neither. There is here a Rosenfeld flays about her, a ferocity and ire that’s both deeply personal yet made universal.