Danse Perdue is the dance of the lost and missing, of the hidden and the things we hide; the dance of our hidden nature, of spirits, of our secrets. A lost dance of the buried histories, a dance of the disappeared, committed, murdered, imprisoned, sickened; a dance of invisible doors and closed eyes and paths not taken and the hollow inside you; a dance of requiem for the ones we killed and the ones we made; a dance of recognition for jinen (自然 for all), for everything -- for the cycle of life and death, always hungy, always scratching away old skin, always searching for meaning, staring and staring through the keyhole, always wanting to see, always wanting to know. A dance to become. To become you. A dance to become everything. A dance that is an eye that is a mirror looking through your eye when you are watching. A dance that is what you mean, not what you say you mean. That is the desire of Danse Perdue. That is its nature.

Currently the core members of Danse Perdue are Vanessa Skantze, Alex Ruhe, and Kaoru Okumura. Danse Perdue performances exist in five seperate forms.

1. As art installations that also serve as performance environments.
2. As choreographed works, always in collaboration with composing musicians.
3.  As structured improvisation concepts with noise, experimental, classical, jazz, and rock musiicians.
4. Occasionally as student-incorporating performances. And
5. As parades and marches a la the danse macabre for street performances and festivals.

The foundation of Danse Perdue’s work can be found in The Ankoku Butoh Dance of Tatsumi Hijikata, the Poor Theater of Jerzy Grotowski, the Jinen Butoh of of Atsushi Takenouchi, The Theater of Cruely of Antonin Artaud, The Body Weather Farm Butoh of Min Tanaka, and in Ritual Theater and a wide array of dissident artists, writers, performers and philosophers.

Since its inception in 2002, Danse Perdue, "lost dance,” has served as a performance arts company whose projects are rooted in the exploration of spiritual and physical struggle, in crisis. Internal, millennial and universal crises. There is a high regard for social alchemy, for revolution – no matter how useless, and whatever the means and intentions. Danse Perdue creates pieces that draw from fine, classical and outlaw arts aesthetics, from mental and social illnesses, from psychological and transgressive literature. Danse Perdue’s performances shun the familiar and always reflect uncertainty and inevitability; the ambiguities of nature, philosophy, and ethics. Danse Perdue’s work concerns illumination, possession, and transmutation – mutations of intimacy; the ceaseless birth and death of microorganisms writhing within surges of passion and violence; the impossible knowledge that we are all inextricably linked in the unspeakable; the emotive currents inside atrocities; murder in the eye of the lover; the romance of ruins; the theater of our dead.

Danse Perdue are the founders of PSYCHOMACHIA THEATER (Teatro de la Psychomachia) located at 1534 1st Ave S. in SODO Seattle, an art, performance and teaching studio aimed at fostering ritual, avant, spiritual, transgressive and experimental works.

Danse Perdue have performed and taught workshops in many venues in the United States and in Europe. To discuss booking Danse Perdue, write to them at psychomachia.theater@gmail.com. But first, please peruse the information on the workshops page.

Danse Perdue has been honored to collaborate with a great number of seminal musicians and performers over the years. This collaboration – the musician and the performer as equals -- is an essential fundament of Danse Perdue. Therefore, they encourage you to contact them at psychomachia.theater@gmail.com with challenging ideas and projects.

Danse Perdue has been honored to collaborate with a great number of seminal musicians and performers over the years. This collaboration – the musician and the performer as equals -- is an essential fundament of Danse Perdue.

Music

• Hiroko Komiya
• Joy Von Spain
• Celadon - http://www.maia-arts.com/music
• Sisiutl
• Hipster Death
• noisepoetnobody
• loopool
• Lube Fondue
• Vox Vespertinus
• Tatsuya Nakatani
• ... TBD

Performance

• Atsushi Takenouchi

Inspiration

In addition to the companies and luminaries mentioned above, and its collaborators, Danse Perdue’s work is inspired by Cioran, Jean Genet, Ron Athey, Diamanda Galas, Jhon Balance, Peter Christopherson, Bataille, Marquis de Sade, Borges, William S. Burroughs, Vaneigem, Thomas Bernhard, McCarthy, Bosch, Joel-Peter Witkin, Lydia Lunch, to name a few ... to create a living mirror….

“Ankoku butoh,” means, roughly, the dance of darkness.

Beyond that, Butoh is easy to talk about and almost impossible to define.

Butoh dance emerged from post war Japan in 1959, and because of being born from devastation, Butoh is at its root a dance that grows like a flower from rubble, malformed but hungry, alive, seeking light.

The essence of Butoh dance is crisis and growth.

But what is Butoh? ...more