FringeReview UK 2026

Resonant Void

Joanna Rosenfeld

Genre: Devised, Experimental, Experimental Art, One Person Show, Solo Show, Surrealism, True-life

Venue: The Lantern Theatre

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

What distinguishes Joanna Rosenfeld’s practice is its commitment to image as a mode of knowledge. Rather than developing through narrative or argument, it unfolds through embodied images in which body and material continually reshape one another.

Butoh can be understood alongside practices such as Aikido, Tai Chi and contact improvisation through a shared concern with body consciousness, balance, attention and the cultivation of embodied awareness. Although Butoh emerged from a distinct cultural and artistic context, it resonates with movement disciplines that emphasise centring, responsiveness and the body’s capacity for self-organisation.

This territory is highly relevant to Rosenfeld’s work, where movement repeatedly emerges from processes of containment, resistance, transformation and release rather than from expression in any conventional theatrical sense.

Running beneath the performance is a concern with body consciousness: the body’s capacity to recognise, respond and understand before conscious thought catches up.

A sensation in the gut. A shift in awareness. A response that arrives before language.

The space is lined with transparent plastic. At its centre sits a tent-like structure onto which images of water are projected. Immediately the image suggests origins. The sea. The womb.The image feels cinematic, as though we are entering the opening frame of a dream in which elemental forces precede identity and narrative.

Inside the structure, Rosenfeld moves, causing the form to shift and transform. The construction resembles the framework of a small modern dome tent, its flexible poles bending and flexing under pressure from within.As Rosenfeld pushes against the structure, the poles bow, collapse and reform. Curves become angles. Organic form gives way to geometry, yet the geometry remains fluid and constantly changing. What begins as a womb becomes a language of forms. The changing configurations suggest a movement from undifferentiated life towards awareness and organisation. Yet nothing becomes fixed. Each arrangement exists only momentarily before transforming into the next.Geometry is not imposed upon the structure. It emerges from within it.

It is worth remembering that Butoh emerged within a wider avant-garde ecology that included photographers, visual artists, designers and Surrealists. Tatsumi Hijikata’s collaborations with figures such as photographer Eikoh Hosoe and poet-critic Shūzō Takiguchi helped establish a visual language in which body, image and environment became inseparable. Seen in this context, Rosenfeld’s use of projection, plastic, sculptural form and shifting geometry feels entirely consistent with Butoh’s origins as an interdisciplinary art form rather than simply a dance practice.

The opening image of Rosenfeld’s performance reportedly came as a direct download from Hijikata. The work follows images rather than concepts and its coherence emerges through the unfolding logic of those images rather than through an imposed narrative. Although it is evident that there is an inherent rhythmic structure.Like Haiku, it trusts juxtaposition. Meaning arises in the space between images rather than through explanation.

Rosenfeld then appears behind a large sheet of transparent plastic. She walks repeatedly backwards and forwards. The action creates a rhythmic score. Repetition creates tension. Repetition stores charge as the body becomes activated through action. This is not a relaxed or meditative walk. The rhythm feels contained. It generates pressure.Her face presses against the plastic. The features distort. Identity is obscured.

The plastic functions simultaneously as membrane, veil, skin and barrier. The figure remains visible but inaccessible, trapped behind its own surface, until an arm suddenly breaks through. The membrane is breached. Birth. Breakthrough. Emergence. The plastic falls away.

What follows is metamorphosis. The material that once functioned as a barrier becomes sculptural material. It is gathered, wrapped, stretched and reshaped. Rosenfeld creates a succession of forms in which body and material become inseparable .Again and again materials cease to function as objects and become active participants in the image. The performance unfolds as a sequence of living sculptures. The dome, the membrane, the projected imagery, the emerging body and the shifting plastic forms unfold through time. The body ‘inhabits’ sculptural configurations rather than merely moving through space.

The audience is invited in to experience them rather than decode them, though many will inevitably find themselves doing both. This is where the performance reveals itself most fully as Butoh. Not as a display of technique. But as a practice grounded in embodied imagery. From here the imagery deepens.

Rosenfeld, dressed in black, moves through images that seem to exist between personal and collective memory. There are echoes of mourning, widowhood, birth, death and rites of passage. The visual language occasionally recalls the dark elegance of Spanish Golden Age portraiture, where black clothing carried associations of grief, mortality and dignity. One image remains particularly vivid.An upside-down female figure suspended within darkness. The body appears displaced from its ordinary orientation. For me the image recalls the dislocated bodies of Hans Bellmer, suspended between object and human presence. So too does the Hanged Man of the Tarot: surrender, suspension and the possibility of seeing differently.

Before transformation can occur, a familiar perspective must be relinquished. The performance repeatedly returns to these threshold states. The sea. The membrane. The breakthrough. The emergence from darkness. The inverted body.

Repeatedly, images of passage appear, not narrative transitions but transformations; and then seizure. Before the spinning begins there is a phase of fitting: the body shakes, convulses, in waves of tension and discharge. The movement carries echoes of seizure, not as pathology but as a bodily process through which accumulated force passes and reorganises itself. It has the quality of a shake out, a physical clearing through which the body sheds what it no longer needs to hold.

Historically within anthropological study such states have often been associated with shamanic practices, where trembling and involuntary movement are understood as signs of transition between ordinary and altered states of consciousness. The body appears less to perform movement than to be moved by it.The later spinning sequences develop these concerns further.

The turning body recalls the whirling practices associated with Sufi traditions, where repeated turning becomes a means of abandoning the ego and moving towards another state of awareness. The body revolves around a centre. The spinning is not decorative. It serves a purpose. It reorganises what has accumulated and this leads into the final and perhaps most demanding sequence as Rosenfeld repeatedly strikes the floor with her skirt, driving the action towards exhaustion. The Tarantella traditions of Southern Italy come to mind; the bite of the spider. Contemporary interpretations understand the spider less as a literal cause than as a metaphor for grief, trauma and emotional suffering. Within this tradition the spider becomes both wound and weaver; the source of disturbance and creator of patterns. Seen through this lens, the repeated striking of the floor is not choreography but anxiety, grief and tension being displaced through movement.

The action recalls Grotowski’s notion of via negative: not the accumulation of technique, but the removal of obstacles. I couldn’t help but think of exorcism. Not in a religious sense, but as the physical expulsion of pressure accumulated through repetition, rhythm and exhaustion. What emerges is not resolution but release.

I recalled the second Sex Pistols performance which I had witnessed as an art student ,where Johnny Rotten appeared to channel frustration and urgency with such intensity that the distinction between performer and audience seemed temporarily to dissolve. This memory surfaced because Rosenfeld’s final actions operate in a similar way. As her action ceases to function as image alone. What began as contained pressure is projected outward into the space. I loved this show for its simplicity, its clarity and because it made me recall much of what I have written here.

The images do not describe transformation. They enact it!  In my book there’s power in that.

Published June 14, 2026 by Rikki Tarascas