The Sprit in the Dust at Kino Teatr, St-Leonard’s.

As the performance begins, the audience sees a long curtain dropped in from the ceiling to the floor; it does not take up the full width of the stage. Afrit Nebula, a three piece band, are set up to one side. The stage is then plunged into darkness, and a voice comes from it: ‘She wasn’t there in the beginning, and then she was. And she moved, she was moving. She moved. She came from something else, which was she, and which was ‘she’, before. She was there, and is there, and she came from what was before’. The stage awakens as a projection appears on the curtain; a shimmering watery luminescence, and the band ignites, first a rumble, then an eruption of sound as a soprano saxophone pierces the room. But slowly, the sound settles again leaving only ambient, residual ringing. From behind the curtain, the face and fingers of a figure push out. 

The Spirit in the Dust is the product of a three way collaboration between renowned Japanese Butoh-influenced dancer Yumino Seki, St-Leonard’s based 3-piece band Afrit Nebula, and film maker Mark French. Yumino Seki plays the role of a world spirit who has been conjured into being ‘from darkness’, and, brutally exposed to world, ‘learns what it is to be human’. The piece takes its inspiration from a quote attributed to Albert Einstein: ‘Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper’. It is about the mystery of human agency in a world full of forces; the invisible piper. What animates us, and does it come from within, or without. Its description of this mystery is beautiful. Multiple agents act on one another; sound, light, material, body, but it is unclear who or what is the primary agent; which acts, and which reacts. By extension, it is unclear where the boundaries of each agent begin and end. As the eerily detached voice (the only entity detached from this messy interplay of actions and actors) describes, Seki’s world spirit ‘came from what was before’, and was conjured in a flash. There is a new reality, yes, but the material essence has not changed, only moved. ‘She was moving out of nothing’, the voice says, ‘into a new space which had come out of nothing’. Once alive, she is a part of what now surrounds her. She is part of the ebb and flow of the new reality, and the causation within it is difficult to pick apart.

This feeling of dynamic interplay between agents pervades the entire piece down to the performers themselves. I spoke to Ken Edwards, founding member and bass player of Afrit Nebula, about the intuitive nature of the relationships between each member of the band and Seki, as, embodying the spirit of the piece, they intuitively allow the direction of influence between them to shift. At times the world spirit is commanding, pulling the around curtain in tight step with the band’s rhythms, demanding they keep up. Yet other times her movement lags in jolts behind them, and she seems distressed.

Both Afrit Nebula avant-jazz influence, and Seki’s Butoh-influenced practise suit this ‘script-less’ approach to performance. Butoh is a dance form originating in Japan, borne in the late 1950s as a rejection of the constrained and refined traditional Japanese dance traditions. It is associated with ‘unsocialised movements’, and, befitting this piece, addresses the question of human control. Butoh begins, one practitioner describes, by an ‘abandonment of the self’, creating an empty shell in which external stimuli can enter and move the body. Though Seki’s world spirit is not an empty shell, she struggles for influence against the powerful forces of light and sound.

There are many reasons to find this performance moving. I found it metaphorical of infancy; my nephew turned 1 last month, and has just learned to walk. Though he came from ‘what was before’, the material essence of his parents, he is also a new agent, slowly exerting his own agency on the world. Now he is here he is fundamental to reality, not a bolt on. ‘That was before, and this is after. After is different in some way’, the voice says. But it also speaks about a fundamental human anxiety around control. It is distressing to feel like life, with the demands and forces of other agents, is happening to you. As an audience, then, we root for the world spirit, finding joy in the moments of calm, when the sound and light settle and afford her respite to move for herself. The performers of, too, have learned to relish those moments. Over time, Ken Edwards says, they have learned ‘less is more, to make use of the silence, to reign back at times and enjoy the space’. I found these moments most moving; they are hopeful and optimistic. Having recently left my job I am craving space from the rolling demands of life to forge a new path forward.  The Spirit in the Dust will perform again at Fabrica, Brighton, on the 23rd of May. I cannot wait to see it.

Yumino Seki as the World Spirit. Credit: Mark French.

The Spirit In The Dust performs again at Fabrica, Brighton on 23 May. Their performance at the Kino Teatr St Leonard’s is available on YouTube via the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5UL81DZwsI.

This article was written for and published by Hastings Independent Press.