Masculine Feminine Vangeline
Vangeline ... becomes a complete being —male and female, animal, vegetable and mineral, down to earth and out of time.
Directed, choreographed, and performed by Vangeline
Costumes by Machine Dazzle
Music by Ray Barragan Sweeten
Lighting by Ayumu "Poe" Saegusa
LaMama Moves! Festival at LaMama Experimental Theater, New York
April 18, 2026
Butoh artiste Vangeline continues to amaze. Last year she was synching brain waves with a male Japanese dancer in a piece (which I didn’t see) called Man/Woman. This year she has dispensed with punctuation and partner, and become a complete being —male and female, animal, vegetable and mineral, down to earth and out of time. She calls it Man Woman.
This world premiere began with an image of woman weighed down with the colossal couture of a male-dominated world. All that’s visible of her is a pretty face encased in an enormous wad of robes, ruffles, and feathers – a trophy queen topped with a fanned-out black cockade, imprisoned by imperial edict. Left alone, she wrinkles her nose, puckers her chin – then discovers her hands amid the feathers, and tortuously works herself free, limb by limb.
The road ahead, however, is narrow and full of obstacles — in the form of pop-up penises in various states of erection. She tiptoes over this hazardous course to the titters of an astonished audience, then performs a chain of tight turns to wrap the road around her ankles. Plopping the rolled-up costume over the rolled-up road, she then gets down of her knees and uses the bundle to scrub the floor, to a sound-track of screaming babies.
Has the lot of womankind ever been so thoroughly trashed? Maybe only by the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, who wrote of marriage: “sex is boring, housework is boring, children are boring." Thus ends Part One of Man Woman.
After a blackout Vangeline re-appears as a child, of the forest and the ballet. All in white, in a simple leotard and slippers, her face chalked white, she kneels behind a headpiece that resembles a treetop, or a set of antlers. Slowly and dliberately she lifts the crown and places it on her head, then takes up two smaller hand-pieces, of the same pattern. She stands up and walks slowly toward us, each step a tendu into fourth position. As she walks, she opens and closes her hands, intertwining then separating the hand-held branches. Clashing and retreating, joining together and separating, it reminded me of an ancient ritual dance from rural England.i My female companion said it reminded her of the outward rotation of the hip joints in childbirth. The dancer was giving birth to herself.
It could have, maybe should have, ended there. But the hour concluded with Vangeline laying down her woodsy props and performing in her signature style a glacial, acrobatic floor-barre, repeatedly balancing the whole body on the bend of one knee and tip of one elbow.
“Man Woman” picks up where Vangeline’s 2021 solo piece “Etermity 123” left off. It’s a more personal vision, looking back to her childhood in the forests of Burgundy, reliving it in a way that gives it new life, more life. And I’ll bet there’s more of this story to come.
Copyright © 2026 by Tom Phillips
