Kitt Johnson is unique on the Danish dance scene.

Kitt Johnson is a cheerful and serious person. When one meets her for the first time, after only seeing her on stage in her by now long list of original performances, one is surprised by her charisma. Her eyes, which can cut through the room like knives, can also glow with warmth and humour. One is faced not by a person who broods but by a physical lightweight who is an intellectual heavyweight. This is a remarkable balance in the world of dance. Perhaps that is the reason one never leaves her performances with thoughts of suicide or dissolution, even though she has lead her audience into the darkest inferno, where angels dare not tread and which devils have long ago abandoned. It is not her intention to frighten us out of our wits, but more to expose the layers of convention under which we are inclined to stagnate due to laziness or the common fear of breaching the restrictions of civilization. With pure movement that finds direction, via her stringent imagination, in a time and space we cannot detach ourselves from until she herself withdraws. Kitt Johnson shows us the way to an interior purged of all ornamentation and affectation This always leaves an image which takes on an after-life within those who dare to follow her on a journey through the subconscious’ labyrinths where pain and beauty challenge one another.

Kitt Johnson’s artistic search and creativity are one long exploration of the physically expressive possibilities situated within a world of images she has created based on the paradoxical mixture of sports, modern dance and Japanese Butoh. It was meeting with Anita Saij’s ‘Dance Lab’ which inspired her to move in a direction which she has since developed with a personal style.

In Germany she worked with the choreographer Sasha Waltz and the theatre director Norbert Stockheim. Stockheim introduced her to a new mental world with his utilisation of German expressionism and the French theatre pioneer Antonin Artaud’s ideas of “Theatre of Cruelty.” Artaud wanted to shock his audience into acknowledging the wild and primitive layers that lie below human conformity and inhibition. He was also influenced by the symbolism of Oriental theatre, even though he did not know Butoh dance as a form of artistic expression. Although Butoh has deep roots in Japanese culture, as a phenomenon it is very young. The first real Butoh performance in Europe took place in January 1978 when the Butoh-ha Sebi and Ariadone group performed at the Nouveau Carre Théâtre in Paris. They broke the ground for that raw and ascetic style which, as an extremely innovative element in dance and performance art, was fascinating.

Besides the native Japanese who visited Europe and the USA, the expression of Butoh was gradually taken on by a long list of Western choreographers who strove to achieve a deconstruction of that dance which had often descended to loud ‘show-biz’ or brooding introversion.

Kitt Johnson, like so many other Western dancers involved with Butoh, might have travelled to Japan but this she consciously avoided. She had no desire to travel and adopt others’ ideas before she had first clarified her own artistic aims. Later, when she had established these, she travelled to Japan where the reaction ranged from loathing to enthusiasm. Equipped with a university degree, Kitt Johnson’s approach to making dance theatre has always been influenced by literature. The written word and dance are basically different but, in her opinion, they also have in common what she calls, ‘a silent wealth of images’. This she has found in the works of such authors as Elias Canetti, who, in his autobiography, ‘Die geretete Zunge’, portrays an individual who is constructed, and almost deconstructed, by language. In his most famous novel, ‘Die Blendung’, he depicts the reality of evil, and destructiveness’ demonry. Kitt Johnson does not try to illustrate her sources of inspiration in the process of artistic interpretation, but rather, as she describes it herself, she builds on the tension, which arises between resistance within the body’s physical limitations, flexibility in the text and the mental expressiveness. In this process, light and images are drawn into a synthesis which produces the final result.

In her work Immemorial, from 1995, there is a typical starting point for Kitt Johnson’s universe as dancer and choreographer. We see a bundle on the floor attached to the ceiling by a rope of braided pieces of cloth. With brilliant body control, attention is drawn into a deep concentration of the delicate details she successfully links together in a slow and mysterious evolution. First, the rope is cut from a head appearing out of a collapsed tent which is then raised. We are approximating a human form whose face becomes visible like a mask behind a web of delicately arranged hair drawn taut between the fingers. A painful deliverance. The figure wriggles its way out of the tent, leaving it like a twisted cocoon on the floor. Kitt Johnson has rebirthed and now stands, in a red loin cloth, with renewed power that reveals itself in her quick leaps from one point of balance to the next, the mangled hair again an element of the bodily image.

This rebirth is very characteristic of Kitt Johnson’s approach to choreography. From a space far removed from time and place she takes her starting point, to then move closer with her message from the recesses of the mind. She seeks an essence whose interior is governed by a strict plastic logic, but whose exterior allows the individual spectators to be present with their own view. And what a view. It is like being on a journey to some mental Galapagos where a person’s anatomy is transformed into all imaginable variations. Kitt Johnson becomes ashen, an aristocratic spider, poisonous fungus, bat, larva or absolutely scrawny, naked human who can step in and out of himself. Sometimes, she says, the most difficult is to find the way back.

Translated by L. L. Hayles & Rory McKeever