Energy of Pink, unplugged - was an exhibition in Ruhrgebiet in 2009, where the German painter Claudia Schmidt shared a bit of her ever-crossing connections between Butoh and Visual Arts. She considers her paintings as extreemly fragile shapes - keeping them together only by energy. This is the point of contact between her dance and her Butoh paintings, this is the agreement.
I had the chance to dance with Claudia in the last Tadashi Endo's workshop in Gottingen (jan 2010), and had access to her work - which made me think about how Butoh is everywhere and definitely not determined to a mean of art, basically because Butoh is, above all, an attitude. I see no harm in appropriating culturally Butoh for visual arts, theatre, films etc, actually this is very interesting in my oppinion. I hope along this year to be able to develop a substantial thesis, part of my MA, and understand more how cultural borrowing or appropriation becomes part of an identity of an artist. Why is Butoh so vunerable? and influencial?
Anyway, feel free to go through Claudia Schmidt's work here and please visit her personal website and her manager's website in Frankfurt.
The first painting is called "Durchlass - Form" #8(Let through-Shape), 2010
50 x 60 cm, Acrylic on canvas.
This second picture is from her studio, there you can feel the exact proportions of the paintings, usually large, and of course you can imagine that it requires a total commitment of the whole body when painting them. Colours and shapes are indeed performative, for Claudia: energy. If she paints with the same viceral movements that she dances... I would love to experience seeing her painting... Can you identify Butoh in them? Check how independend white, black, blue and pink behave - for me, these powerful shades remind me of some of my dreams when the world looks blured and I can dance with the shapes making everything that has vertices get round and irregular. I guess this is what both Claudia and I want, in a dream, in a dance, in a painting, in life.
