Review  by Sandra Wilk for Strona Tanca, Poland

There is no world. There are worlds.
On 27th April 2025, as part of the 7th Butohpolis International Festival of the Art of
Butoh, we watched the premiere of Paula Jeanine Bennett’s “The Wanting Creature” -
an original performance combining movement, poetry, props and music. This was the
last stage presentation of the Butohpolis festival in Warsaw, so it left the audience with
a symbolic message for the future. For the road ahead...
Without a doubt, Paula Jeanine Bennett’s (USA) offering was Butohpolis’ most literary
and melancholic performance. In its conception, it built space for multiple layers of the
self, and its title and the text used were reflections on illusion and elusive longing from
a poem by the 15th-century Indian mystic Kabir. However, what was heard in the
sound and musical layers largely slipped away under the weight of what was
happening in front of us, the audience.
Here, the peculiar post-industrial space in one of the halls of Prague Square*
contrasted brutally with the delicate matter of the subject addressed and the props
used for this butoh. The props and the scenery in “The Wanting Creature” were
malleable fabrics personalized by Bennett for her story. It is as if we are trying to pit
poetic or philosophical musings against the predatory world of capitalism, or as if we
are pitting the silence of a personal encounter with wildlife against the world of
overhyped and overblown social media.

Perhaps it was because of this brutal space that absolutely everything in Bennett’s
performance seemed incredibly ephemeral to me. One stronger gesture could have
torn off the delicate cloth that weaved through the acting area. The performer rolled it
so slowly that the movement of the material was immeasurably soft, as if it were
flapping in a gentle breeze. It reminded me of a mantra that repeats itself and draws
the self into itself without evoking any violent emotion.
Then we got a bit of a chill when the dancer was on the floor, getting down on it and
touching it with great tenderness, almost like Colin, the kid from “The Secret Garden”,
who had been locked in a room for years, wallowing in despair and guilt, could finally
find himself outside, lying down on real wet earth, smelling it, feeling it between his
fingers and as if nothing else in the world, or the worlds in general, existed anymore.
We then noticed the cracks in the concrete, the textures of the exposed bricks on the
walls, the words and other elements on the fabrics. But when the performer first
approached the large factory window with its distinctive structural supports, suddenly
the hot rays of the sun burst through the glass for a moment and flooded her frail
human figure with white light.
I know these are trifles that for many are insignificant, but all these elements of the
concrete floor, the walls, the windows, the fabrics, the sound and light events, the
echoes bouncing off the high ceiling, built up the specific mood of this performance.
They were, on the one hand, ephemeral and, on the other, crucially significant. After
all, we have walked on this cracked floor before, but did we pay attention to the
surface, worn out by years and its structure, forever disturbed? Certainly not. And I
think that forcing us (through the calm pace and the economy of means used in
“The Wanting Creature” thus isolating us from fast and intense stimuli) to this
attentiveness, to this momentary forgetting of the outside world, to this suspension in
time, may be an important achieved effect for Paula Jeanine Bennett than our
immersion in Kabir’s poem, previously unknown for most viewers. What we needed to
see was evident: from the small gestures and inner experience, to the anger and
despair in the dynamic scene of the “rejection” of one of the materials, to the quieting
and growing in strength before the final scene and the entrance “Into the fabric”
arranged in the shape of a single track maze. The fabric had text on it - it’s a shame
that we didn’t have the opportunity to see it up close as an art object beforehand.
Before passing through the labyrinth (spiral, vortex), the performer takes off her
distinguished hat for a moment and puts it on again, but with the tulle up. For me, the
lifting of this veil is like the end of a period of morning, depression or suffering. And
Bennett herself assumes, I think for the first time, a completely upright position, her
head raised high as if she is speaking to us with her body, as if to say “Enough already,
I proudly enter the unknown, into an encounter with the universe”.
What meaning was hidden in the last scene, when this butoh dancer lifts the fabric of
the labyrinth above her head? Is it just a desire or is it already an accomplished act?
The breaking of some vicious circle? A seemingly modest move, yet there is power in
it, for Bennett looks as if, after years of suffering on earth, the biblical Eve had returned

to Eden, slayed the serpent that tempted her and was now dragging its body behind
her in a gesture of triumph. And more realistically, her passage across the stage space
and, interestingly, the audience as well, was like a silent cry of coming out of the
emotional ruins and beginning her next journey.
There was something contemplative and instructive at the same time in Paula Jeanine
Bennett’s “The Wanting Creature”. Not so much about the world we perceive but
ignore, but about the fragile worlds within ourselves that we do not ignore but fail to
see.