A SECOND SILENCE EVEN DENSER
by
UK
Premiere 12 September 2025
Performance 13 September
Kanuti Gildi SAAL
A solo butoh performance grown from the poetry of Alejandra Pizarnik.
A second silence even denser began from the poetry of Alejandra Pizarnik, exploring abjection, queer desire and bodily estrangement. The work looks for a permeable skin between body, language and space that can scar, absorb, and be permeated; looking through the immateriality of language for new pathways for accessing the slimy, fleshy and sensual material density of the body.
This solo draws broadly from Pizarnik’s poetry, prose, drawings, letters and biography ‘translating’ these texts and images into movement scores based on the Butoh notation form known as ‘butoh-fu’; reflecting Pizarnik’s research into a sense of ‘spirit’, or of the ghostly, within language; influenced by Natsu Nakajima’s description of Butoh as ‘a conflict between language and the body’ that strives ‘to put into words that which cannot be put into words…to give form to that which is formless…,’. Embodying the fragmented and hybrid portrayal of identity and selfhood within the writings, I travel through personas and alter-egos while introducing strands of narrative, biography and autobiography and the body as a vessel of appetite and emptiness, memory and poetry, repulsion and compulsion.
ARTISTIC TEAM
THANK YOU
Marlène Jöbstl, Maria Papachristodoulou, Ana Trif
SPECIAL THANKS
Cecilia Macfarlane
PRODUCTION
CPPM | Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Charis Taplin
Charis Taplin is a physical performance maker from the United Kingdom, now based in Tallinn. With a background in dance and in literature, for the past three years her practise has largely centred around Butoh, whilst also directing, writing and exploring diverse stage disciplines with a particular interest in puppetry and object manipulation. Her work returns always to the performing body as a threshold where the polarities of sacred and profane, mystical and domestic, personal and collective, collapse.
Photographs: Kalev Lilleorg
Made within the MA in Contemporary Physical Performance Making
