Experimenting with Movement Topography in the Spirit of Asbestos Hall — Reflections on 'Visits #1 & #2'
- Elspeth Chan
- Jul 1
- 3 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
Welcome to Asbestos Hall Visits #1& #2 unfold as an experimental, ongoing process rather than a conventional performance, imagining a meeting point between butoh, Vogueing, postmodern dance, and beyond. Conceived by associate artist Trajal Harrell, whose passion for dance, fashion, and theory permeates the work, the pieces explore connections between butoh’s inward, soul-driven movement and Vogueing’s external performativity. While both share controlled, contorted limb movements, the performances do not explicitly dramatize this tension; instead, the first piece subtly reveals fragility — not as victimhood but as a source of strength and togetherness, a theme reinforced in the second piece.
The venue is metaphorically shaped as Asbestos Hall, the Tokyo studio founded by butoh pioneer Tatsumi Hijikata and his wife in the 1950s. Asbestos Hall was a fertile ground for artistic experimentation and exchange, where boundaries between body and mind were challenged. By connecting butoh and Vogueing, Visits #1 & #2 evoke the balance between avant-garde practice and commercial shows often navigated by artists in the 50s.
Visit #1 features two performers on an intimate stage defined by a chalk circle with the audience sitting at its perimeter. One performer wears a yellow-and-white striped top with a shiny earth-tone skirt, the other a velvet bandeau and denim skirt, but these are exchanged mid-performance. The exchanged outfits fit more naturally, symbolizing transformation and fluid identity. Performers shift eye contact between meeting, rolling up, and downward glances. Their leg-crossing movements transition from rhizomatic instability to circle-aligned precision with musical shifts. After leaving and returning in altered but similar costumes (shorter skirt, another blue top), movements intensify into radical gun-like gestures and pushing. This costume-movement interplay invites contemplation on identity, the body's relationship to fabric, and the ambiguous dynamic shift in a relationship.
Visit #2 shifts to a predominantly black-and-white palette, with four performers and accessories like hats and handbags hidden in a wardrobe at the chalk circle’s center. Harrell’s entrance from behind the wardrobe, draped in an olive-green shawl, sets a tone of stylized grace aligned with New Way Vogueing and Vogue Fem. The performers whirl around the chalk circle with exaggerated dips, spins, and elegant hand gestures, focusing less on virtuosity than on the performativity of fashion and movement combined. Oversized Halloween-like capes obscure faces, while a soundtrack blending ballroom and piano music creates an eerie, frisky atmosphere. Unlike traditional ballroom Vogueing’s competitive display, the performers play with their costumes and accessories — Harrell’s symbolic use of a belt as a rope to choke himself, together with the previous ghostly touch, underscores the complex interplay of power, vulnerability, death and spectacle. It also reminds the audience of Hijikata’s declaration of butoh as ‘a corpse standing straight up’.
Both Visits reject spectacle on virtuosity in favor of a postmodern sensibility that nevertheless commands the audience’s gaze. In Visit #1, fierce facial expressions and confident gestures — salutes, thumbs-up, chest taps — challenge and subvert spectators’ expectations, embodying a tension between strength and fragility. Their slightly crossing legs, with one foot falling ahead, further evoke this delicate balance. This performative quality resonates with butoh’s embrace of vulnerability and Vogueing’s outward assertion.
Ultimately, both Visits offer a hybrid artistic experience transcending simple fusion. Harrell reimagines historical encounters through the body as a vessel, shifting movement topographies in a catwalk manner that symbolically transports Hijikata’s legacy beyond Japan’s borders, where his works were never staged. The performances invite reflection on the significance of costume and fabric in expressing identities. The subtle costume exchanges in Visit #1 echo About Kazuo Ohno, in which Takao Kawauchi performs in his customized costumes even though he was given the opportunity to wear Ohno’s original iconic garments, highlighting how fabric may signify both selfhood and homage. While the appropriation of costume and fabric remains understated, Visits serve as a profound meditation, provoking questions about identity, gender, history and cultural exchange.
*** Visits #1 & #2 are part of the Holland Festival 2025, for more information: https://www.hollandfestival.nl/en/festival-2025.
