By Rich Monetti***From April 24-26, Coney Island USA will present the International Culture Lab’s (ICL) 5th Annual Coney Island Ritual Cabaret Festival (CIRC). The inspiration of the festival has been a performance art emanating from a Japanese dance form known as Butoh. This discipline is a little hard to pin down, according to ICL’s cofounder Gabriele Schafer. “Nobody knows how to define it,” Schafer says. But the combination of playful and grotesque imagery, taboo topics and extreme or absurd environments are aspects of Butoh that followers can all agree on. “Transformation of the self, of society, of humanity and what it means to be human defines the form,” adds Schafer.
The premise of Butoh first arose in 1959 by Butoh’s primary founders, Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno. “It spread all over the world,” Schafer explains. In the teaching, Hijikata introduced the techniques and specific exercises to be undertaken during the day. So limbered up, performers ran with their work for hours. “At night the same dancers then experimented with bringing their exploration into the competitive marketplace of cabaret/burlesque,” according to Schafer, who founded the company as Thieves Theatre forty years ago with her husband Nick Fracaro.
Schafer’s introduction to Butoh occurred in 2000 when she began taking classes with various masters at CAVE Art Space. “I went on to co-produce the CAVE New York Butoh Festival in 2005 and 2007,” she says. The very traditional Thieves Theatre thus shifted its outlook and put on its first Butoh production in 2003. ICL’s immersion went on to get its biggest kick when they were able to recruit Mexico’s most renowned Butoh master, Diego Pinon, who came three years in a row, starting in 2014. Evolving since, CIRC introduced its own spin. “This hand-in-glove development of high and low art forms is the impetus for our explorations into what we call Ritual Cabaret at our site-specific location in Coney Island,” Schafer says.
Further rooted in the traditions of P.T. Barnum, dime museums, burlesque, circus sideshows, vaudeville and Coney Island itself, performers are encouraged to deconstruct their regular art forms. “What we’re asking people who are more entertainment-based is to reexamine what they normally do—break it down and become a little more deliberate about it and then see what can be added and tweaked,” she says. A look inside is part of the process too, according to Nick Fracaro. “A lot of times, it becomes this introspection by the performer, and they go to a much more personal level with what they are doing.”
Fracaro speaks from experience and has put on his own act at CIRC for the last five years. “It’s a little hard to describe. I have this character called Sick Nick, and I do a personal narrative in my hospital robe,” Fracaro reveals. ‘I’m almost like an MC.” Schafer, on the other hand, needs to put aside her creative skills to help pull the show off. “I can’t divide my brain that way,” she says.
The duo gathers their roster of artists by sending out the call for performers. The idea is to get everyone in sync by showtime. “We plan together so it looks like an ensemble instead of just individual acts,” Schafer explains. Her favorite part of the roster comes from Celeste Hastings, who does a synchronized number called Butoh Rockettes, which comes with all the elaborate costumery. “To me that is ritual cabaret defined,” says Schafer.
CIRC opens and closes the ceremony with a big brass band. Acts include the Polar Bear Club’s hundred-year-old Coney Island beach ritual of their own. In addition, the expectation is also that the audience participates in each performance. The frequenting of the nearby Freak Bar by attendees has CIRC also helps build a sustainable community on Coney Island, according to Schafer.
Community is a principle Schafer believes we need badly in our current state of despair and disconnect. “People are looking for a sense of belonging, a sense of being spoken to personally and a sense of knowing everybody in the room—even if you don’t know them,” she concludes.
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