by Steve Finbow
A new dance-theatre and film work created by filmmaker and artist Amélie Ravalec and dancer/performance-artist Paul Michael Henry. Combining Butoh dance, film, music, sound design, video art, poetry, and vocal narrative, the work invites audiences into a labyrinth of fragmented memories and fractured identities. At its heart lies a reflection of our historical crossroads: a burning planet haunted by a collective amnesia, where identities blur and truth lies fractured. But if we can piece together the shards of the broken mirror, even briefly, perhaps we can rediscover why we are here—and what must be done to find a way forward.
A Narraglyph by Steve Finbow
I encountered an ecosystem of unsettling beauty. “The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line.” Narratological visions/words of fragmented memory and apocalyptic imagery haunted by spectral presence of Cthulhu with comingled existential and spiritual dread, inhabitant of seismic and cosmic horror and personal terror. Before bodies and before organs. “If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing.”
I beheld fleeting images of Nazca-like lines and forgotten histories parallelling alien/or beyond-human-understanding of cultural amnesia. Bleeds into Mark Fisher’s theories on hauntology, cultural memory, and melancholia of lost futures, aesthetics of ‘weird’ and ‘eerie’, and whole eldritch view of humanity faced with capitalist estrangement. The information keeps coming, / But I have no storage system. “The eerie is fundamentally tied up with questions of agency. In the case of the failure of absence, the question concerns the existence of agency as such. Is there a deliberative agent here at all? Are we being watched by an entity that has not yet revealed itself?” Artistic nods to Max Ernst’s Europe After Rain and Óscar Domínguez’s decalcomania add surreal elements, dissolving texture to identity, which also mirrors abyss of Dante’s circles of hell. And white ice below, / breathing fissures. / White hoarfrost and ice. “A place called Cocytus, the coldest and deepest circle of Hell, where traitors are punished. Here, the sinners are encased in ice, their faces frozen in expressions of agony, unable to move or speak.”
I witnessed haunting meditation on fractured truth and blurred identities, and labyrinthine depths through which we must endlessly search in pursuit of answer(s). Focus on bound Paul Michael Henry evokes physical existential torment, imagery of Christ’s Passion – I’m an ache pretending to be a tongue. / The core humming now. / Seeping cum and I’m marbling. – “But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds, we are healed” – this intertwined (pun intended) with shibari, kinbaku, shokushu-zeme, ritualistic acts balancing/juxtaposing restraint and liberation, pain and pleasure, freedom and constraint – tensions between vulnerability and control reflect world (and individual) in moral and spiritual crisis. A jellyfish inside my skull floating towards ignition. / A fan-shaped tunnel of nectar, pulp, oblivion. “And when I scream I AM THE SUN an integral erection results, because the verb to be is the vehicle of amorous frenzy.” Bataillean solar theme emerges as destructive force and source of transcendence, its energy illuminates and scorches. “The sun gives without ever receiving. It burns and consumes, radiating energy that is both life-giving and destructive.”
I saw elements of Adam and Christ visited by satanic serpent in spaces that collapse Eden and Gethsemane into singular site of temptation and punishment, where anguish becomes cyclical, torture foreshadowing banishment in endless reenactment. “And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world—he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.” Slithering under my own skin. / Steam birth. / Melting. / Mindforged backwards / into the bloom. Thinking William Blake’s ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ suggest binding constraints of self and society, mankind grappling with external forces and entrapments of their own minds and, psychological, spiritual, and corporeal binds. “In every cry of every Man, In every Infant’s cry of fear.” Eternal recurrence of Schopenhauerian world as will and representation, presents continual, cyclical existential labyrinth within which repetition disorients and provokes doubts about self and universe invoking tortured meditation on essence of life and what it means to confront one’s humanity. I’m becoming the hole. Visually distorted visages reminded me of Francis Bacon’s heads with bruised hues showing physical torment of existence. “Human life must be some kind of mistake. The truth of this will be sufficiently obvious if we only remember that man is a compound of needs and necessities hard to satisfy; and that even when they are satisfied, all he obtains is a state of painlessness, where nothing remains to him but abandonment to boredom.” And “You know, I think of life as meaningless; but we give it meaning during our own existence. The bruises of life leave their mark, but they also shape the art we create.”
I observed that the black horse in Hindu mythology represents guidance, ritual, and overcoming obstacles, being of spiritual support, yet contrasts with biblical ties to death and judgment. Therefore, horse becomes guide and omen, link between immortality and transcendence. Maybe the horse is a piece of a ghost puzzle / to which I too belong. “I heard the third living creature say, ‘Come!’ I looked, and there before me was a black horse! Its rider was holding a pair of scales in his hand.” Labyrinths within labyrinths, architecture of brain, and Nietzschean recursive maze where survival emerges as ultimate selfish act. Etymology of catastrophe (from Greek katastrophē, meaning ‘overturning’ or ‘sudden turn’) and catabasis (from katabasis, ‘downward journey’) and these provide linguistic framework for narrative’s plunge into psychic and existential depths, as catastrophe (and catabasis) become both shattering and descent, a fulcrum for eventual anabasis. I’m choosing to escape but I could just as easily stay. / And now that I’m departing, it’s beautiful either way. “The path I choose through the maze makes me what I am. I am not only a thing, but also a way of being.”
I noticed that like Artaud’s reflections on Balinese dancing, film choreographs disaster with ritual precision, its movements and imagery creating fragile equilibrium between chaos and endurance. I’m free because I’m not human anymore, / and I know everything is pellucid and fever. “Balinese theatre restores the theatre to its original destiny, which is to present the spectacle of a total creation, in which man is no longer the imitator of nature, but becomes the creator of a higher nature.” I saw images like Loplop, Max Ernst’s surreal alter-ego, guide through fragmented identity and friability of meaning and consciousness. You’ll have noticed how the birds / keep their distance from you. “And Loplop, bird superior, has transformed himself into flesh without flesh and will dwell among us.”
I encountered concluding sequence spiralling outward from intimate to infinite, merging atomic with cosmic, like Ernest Rutherford’s microcosm within macrocosm, stars as cells, neurons as orbiting planets and this helps collapse dimensions between personal and universal. I’m a glistening wound / where galaxies rest their heads. “Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world.” Tarot cards introduce chance and fate (chaos and order) where human agency confronts forces beyond comprehension. They say they’re tarot cards shy of being dealt. “The Fool is the spirit of chaos and the child of chance.” Spiralling and circling back to Cthulhu and lingering presence of Lovecraft’s Old Ones, reminder of humanity’s insignificance amid vast, indifferent creation. Labyrinth is fractured nature of truth, complexity of individual and human psychological and physical survival in entropic universe. Black orchids in reverse. “An individual sets out to portray the world. Shortly before their death, they discover that this patient labyrinth of lines is a drawing of their own face.”
Bio: Steve Finbow is the author of Pond Scum and Other Effluvia – Pulp Bits (2005), Allen Ginsberg: A Critical Biography – Reaktion Books (2012), Grave Desire: A Cultural History of Necrophilia – Zero Books (2014), updated & illustrated, Infinity Land Press (2024), Notes from the Sick Room – Repeater Books (2017), Death Mort Tod – Infinity Land Press (2018), The Mindshaft – Amphetamine Sulphate (2020), Polaroid Haiku (with Jukka Siikala) – Infinity Land Press (2023), The Life of the Artist Niccolò di Mescolano – Alberegno Press (2023), Towards an Abstract & Quantum Punctuation – Alberegno Press (2025), and Sanbashi: The Biography of Toru Nakagami, 1930–1949 (Forthcoming, 2025).
