This is the English version of the review originally written in Chinese by the author and published by the dance journal/HK in January 2024, with slight modifications.
Co-choreographers: Tomas Tse & Yuko Kawamoto
Performed 23 December 2023 Ngau Chi Wan Civic Centre, Hong Kong
Have Hong Kongers gained a deeper understanding of social upheaval and war so far in the year 2023? CHARLIE appears to provide us with an opportunity to reconsider this issue.
Leafing through the house program of the latest work CHARLIE by Theatre Aether, phrases such as ‘Vietnamese Boat People’ (Vietnamese migrants)[1], ‘‘bắt đầu từ na’’[2], ‘Purple Haze’, evoke the collective memories played on the radio broadcasts during the British colonial era. Ushered into the auditorium, the audience is greeted by gentle and delicate music, an adaptation of the work of the classical Vietnamese poet Nguyen Du lamenting over the haunting spirits/souls, performed in Cantonese Naamyam (Narrative Songs)[3]. With the historical backdrop of the Vietnam War, the hanging hemp ropes linger, entangle and loom onto the ground, teasing out the narrative: sometimes it creates a scene of fishing boats outlined in dim blue light, sometimes it exudes the uneasiness of overlapping corpses in the darkness.
The Cantonese Naamyam fades, the theatre falls silent and the audience is soaked in pitch black. After the passing of approximately ten minutes, the dancer Tomas Tse emerges slowly from the pile of ropes amidst faint dripping sounds. His white-painted body resembles a newborn peeking at the world from the womb, but more like a survivor struggling for survival after the war. Leaning against the floor, Tse is in an in-between position of sitting and standing, his spasmodic limbs in the slow rolling motion reminiscent of Tatsumi Hijikata's[4] HoSotan in the 1970s. While the huddled image of ‘weak body’[5] in HoShotan depicts leprosy patients, CHARLIE reflects the trembling and cowering of war victims.

Hijikata advocates the spirit of breaking traditional frameworks by defamiliarizing the body, to which CHARLIE adheres. The co-choreographers Kawamoto and Tse explain that the creative process is driven by improvisational imageries rather than directly adopting the Butoh-fu[6]. Determined to depart from this butoh notation, although the characters with the forward-bending upper body, tiptoeing with both feet walking in delicate steps, or the lively bouncy dance of a little girl resonate with Hijikata's masterpieces, they represent the distinct personalities of those who might have endured the aftermath of wars. Tse repeatedly mentions the impact of his visit to the Ukraine Fringe Festival in September 2023: witnessing the continuous air raids, setting foot on post-war ruins, and listening to local people’s stories give him a more concrete and tangible perception of the war. As pointed out by the co-choreographers in the post-performance discussion, the blueprint of the work begins with nearly twenty fragmented improvisations, and the movement design is based on the book Ghosts of the Vietnam War and profound images encountered during the Ukraine trip, pieced together with elements of butoh. The Vietnam War from the 1950s to 1970s is starkly different from the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine (2022) in terms of their historical, political, and cultural contexts, but the casualties affected by the wars experience the universal suffering of humanity. The creative team seeks not to merely reproduce the movements and techniques of the predecessors in butoh, but to explore a contemporary adaptation of Butoh-fu by infusing its transcendent quality between life, pain and death into the discourse of war, injecting the alchemic spirit of butoh into post-war suffering and existence.
Midway through the performance, the dancer fiddled with the black furry costume originally draped over his shoulders, confronting the hemp rope array with a mixture of confusion and fear, as if facing the helplessness of war, exile, and the loss of family. As he gradually eases his dependence on and manipulation of the fur, his demeanor relaxes, and he settles into a more natural and comfortable state. Under the music composed by Masaru Soga, the dancer enters a state of high spirit amid the brisk electronic music, and the fur in his hands instantly turns into an electric guitar as he dances. Finally, he abandons the fur and returns to his nearly naked self, demonstrating even more strength as he fiercely attacks the hemp rope array with all his energy, rolling and tumbling on it until two ropes fall.
There is a subsequent opportunity to talk to Tse, who mentions the work is inspired by Jacques Derrida's hauntology. Tse derives different characters, including the hairless ghost who plays with the furry costume, from the text on the Vietnam War and his experiences in Ukraine. The team therefore ingeniously and symbolically transforms ‘hair’ into furry costumes, and the action of searching for hair becomes the direction of the choreography.

It is convincing that juxtaposing butoh with hauntology contributes to a deeper understanding of this work. Butoh originated in Japan after World War II, when artists rebelled against the established framework in arts amidst the post-war ruins and the Anti-art movement, overturning mainstream aesthetic experiences. Therefore, subverting the stereotype of dance, Hijikata said ‘butoh is a corpse trying desperately to stand upright’. Whilst contemporary butoh traces its lineage and tradition back to the predecessors of Ankoku Butoh[7], the essence of butoh is to constantly change its form according to the era and society of the times, re-exploring the proposition of life and death. On the other hand, Derrida explains in Specters of Marx (1993) that hauntology is a portmanteau of haunting and ontology, which refers to the persistently recurring elements from the past, resembling the existence of ghosts. This intangible and formless presence, neither alive nor dead, is a kind of existence in absence, echoing butoh as an embodied transformative state between life and death. Such an alchemic nature of butoh also reverberates how the suppressed and absent supplement the mainstream narratives in hauntology. Constantly in pursuit of the fur, the hairless ghost, upon deciding to abandon the fur, the lost physical body has symbolically become a phenomenal body, embodying the power of existence. If Hijikata's Revolt of the Body (1968) reflects his redefined understanding of the physical body, freeing himself from the constraints of the anatomical body and its limitations; then CHARLIE (2023) is to expand on Hijikata's reconstructed anatomy, and such liberation is no longer limited to the division and entanglement of the flesh, rather it is an artistic rebellion of metaphysical existence.
The opportunities to stage a butoh work in Hong Kong theatres are rare. The choreographers' attempt to bring together professional creative teams from Japan and Hong Kong is commendable. Particularly CHARLIE is a solo work, which requires high physical and mental demands from the dancer, and more importantly, the work strives to abandon Butoh-fu as the direction of movement design, embodying butoh as an inseparable art form from life. However, butoh is still unfamiliar to the public in Hong Kong who lack personal experience of the turmoil of wars. Given the creation process spans over several years, the team's culmination and transformation of multi-layered imagery can be challenging for the audience to fully comprehend. For instance, lacking knowledge of the hairless ghost's role and symbolism may impede understanding of the subject matter.
In the final scene, Tse wears a dress-like costume turning and spinning with delicate finger movements. When he looks up there is a sense of ritualistic questioning, dedicated to those unmemorable ghosts. The blue light washing the stage floor suddenly turns the textured floor into water ripples. In the realm where spectres return, may the sentient beings embodied by CHARLIE cease to be marginalized, but set foot on the boat and embark on the voyage to reach the other shore.

Notes
[1] Many of Vietnamese refugees immigrated to Hong Kong in the mid-1970s due to the Vietnam War, and they are called the ‘boat people’.
[2] A popular phrase in the 1980s – 90s Hong Kong: it was the announcements broadcasted approximately every hour on the public radio station RTHK.
[3] With a distinctive style in its melodies and singing, Cantonese Naamyam was a popular entertainment sung in vernacular language in the first half of the last century in Hong Kong and Guangdong province.
[4] One of the founders of butoh.
[5] ‘Weak body’ is a concept from Hijikata, who tried to put forth and portray a body with weakness, disease and filth, or qualities that had been eliminated and stigmatized in the mainstream.
[6] Butoh-fu is a set of choreographic notation comprised of words and images, derived from the teaching of Hijikata ‘through the speech’. It is compiled by Yukio Waguri, a direct disciple of Hijikata. Waguri’s interpretation of Butoh-fu is recorded as Butoh-Kaden: https://butoh-kaden.com/en/.
[7] Ankoku Butoh refers to the stream of butoh initiated by Hijikata Tatsumi in 1960s. ‘Ankoku’ means darkness, therefore Ankoku Butoh is interpreted as the ‘Dance of Darkness’.