Odd Hours - 奇妙な時刻 Performance 2021

Performance #2:
New Ab/Normal @ Abbotsford Convent Melbourne
19-23 May 2021

ButohOUT! 2021 New Ab/Normal celebrates the powerful medium of Butoh, inviting audiences to experience a surreal, absurd and euphoric performance, which brings together a diversity of Melbourne-based, contemporary artists in a post-pandemic time.

Inspired by the 1950’s film, Rashomon, Odd Hours offers a multi-layered visual and psychological labyrinth where a 20-odd heterogeneous bunch of artists perform at the rustic, industrial grounds of the Abbotsford Convent. The Rashomon effect is known as a plot device that involves various characters providing subjective, self-serving, and contradictory versions of the same incident. For this performance, individual notions of ‘abnormality’ are transformed into movements, voice and mask/collage work culminating in a site-specific, illusionary installation work.

Odd Hours, driven by the anarchic form of Butoh, poses the urgent question: ‘what is normal?’. Originally called Dance of Darkness, Butoh is often associated with the marginalised, embracing the abnormal, odd, quirky and the deviant. One of the first Butoh performances so shocked its Japanese audiences that it was forced to go underground! Butoh is now widely accepted as an innovative and transformative art form. Conversely, what we used to think as ‘normal’ is no longer so, and the idea of 'what is normal' is changing all the time. We are embracing the term, ‘new normal’, which contains the paradoxical nuance that an abnormality can become ‘normal’. We hang onto a semblance of normalcy like a security blanket - but why?

Embracing the ethos of ButohOUT!, Odd Hours incorporates performers with a range of levels of experience, ages and cultural backgrounds. Led by the creative team of Yumi Umiumare (Butoh), Emma Bathgate (Voice), visual Jacqui Stockdale (Visual Arts) and Dan West (Sound), diverse voices of Melbourne are amplified in this contemporary dance/theatre work.