The Brooklyn Rail

“Grab spiders, breathe fire forward, you become the storm. The storm quiets, and you become the air,” evan ray suzuki prompts a group of dancers, leading them in a warm-up. Adapted from Yumiko Yoshioka, one of suzuki’s teachers, the warm-up represents a practice of butoh, a movement form that originated in Japan in 1959 and has since acquired global popularity. The performers’ knuckles tighten around each spider, as they utter an audible “crunch” in unison. Their storms are slow, but when they “become the air,” the performers’ bodies gnarl into contortions of muscle and bone. These exercises precede a rehearsal for plot hole, suzuki’s performance premiering at Pageant in early November. Featuring performers Amelia Heintzelman, Benin Gardner, Emma Lee, Sabrina Leira, and Zo Williams, original music by Leo Chang, and costumes by Zo Roze, plot hole uses butoh—a practice rooted in intense physicality and image-based generation of movement—to construct a dreamlike logic reminiscent of the internet’s phantasmic flows.

In suzuki’s work, the internet is a choreographic structure: memes, gestural vocabularies from YouTube or TikTok videos, and quotable or “load-bearing” tweets inform scores, dialogue, and relationships between performance collaborators. Although often insidious and now persistently bot-filled, internet realms remain an important method for generating and organizing movement, beyond merely offering opportunities for dance display and circulation. In plot hole, notions of haunting—by past online activity, by artistic and cultural predecessors—also revive critical approaches to identity at a moment when its value as artistic theme is questioned and requires continued questioning. I first encountered suzuki’s work after writing about his frequent collaborator, Glenn Potter-Takata, and I was immediately interested in knowing more about the nexus of the digital, physical, and ghostly in his choreography. In advance of the November premiere, I observed one of the rehearsals for plot hole, after which suzuki and I sat down for a conversation.

Miya Shaffer (Rail): Your upcoming performance at Pageant is the premiere of a new work, although you have performed earlier iterations elsewhere. Can you talk about your process of arriving at this work? Where does it begin for you?

evan ray suzuki: I often start making performances from a visual place. I’ll have a sense of a picture, maybe a tableau that I want to be the starting image of the dance. When I’m making a new work, I’ll be attentive to the specifics of its showcase, like the architecture of the performance venue, but I continue to explore themes that I’ve already spent time with throughout other work.

For this particular piece, I’m drawing on earlier drafts presented at Movement Research at the Judson Church (2024) and Amanda+James’s Summer Happenings Festival (2025), which was a solo occurring on the piers and the beach in Red Hook, Brooklyn. In the version at Pageant, the dance will feature a new cast of performers, some of whom I’ve worked with before and others whom I’m working with for the first time. In this current iteration, I’m trying to take a step back from being a performer in my own choreography and really focus on working with my collaborators. I want to spend time understanding how they each incorporate my choreographic practice into their own bodily techniques and bring their movement histories to the work.

Rail: Speaking of movement histories, butoh provides the backbone of the piece. You have a longstanding butoh practice, and you’ve also described your choreographic work using the term “butoh-ish.” What is your relationship to butoh? What does this “-ish” mean for you?

suzuki: Butoh is the conduit for how I think about and create body-based work. My experience with butoh is both in collaboration with other practitioners—like Glenn Potter-Takata, Kota Yamazaki, and Mina Nishimura—and I’ve also made butoh the core essence of my own artistic output, at least for the past seven or eight years. Many of the performers I bring into my choreographic process do not have extensive familiarity with butoh, but we figure out the contours of our practice when rehearsing together. Butoh is very malleable. It’s not a technique, really, it’s more of a genre or method of approaching things.

The -ish demonstrates that I’m invested in a rigorous engagement with butoh and its conceptual stakes, but I’m also emphasizing a sense of irreverence relative to some of the movement scores and aesthetics. There’s always an interplay between being serious about the practice and allowing other influences to come into its activation, like the “Western” forms of dance training that my collaborators and I possess. In some ways, this is relevant to my position as a mixed-race Japanese American performing butoh. Butoh is a cultural touchpoint for me, but my performance will always be layered with other ideas and influences.

Rail: Let’s stay on this topic of mixed-race Japanese heritage, which is something that we share. Both of us are also yonsei, or fourth-generation Japanese American. Butoh is a cultural touchpoint in terms of ancestral heritage, sure, but that heritage is several generations removed. Butoh also came to prominence post-WWII. Its global transmission is temporally out-of-sync with the standard Japanese diasporic generational framework, which is tied to specific historical markers of late nineteenth-century and early-twentieth century initial immigration, in addition to incarceration during WWII. How does butoh function as a cultural touchpoint for you?

suzuki: Being fourth-generation, or yonsei, can mean that our cultural touchpoints are a bit removed, maybe transmitted via popular culture and media more so than familial tradition, for example. I think it’s interesting to explore butoh specifically in a diasporic context. Butoh is a form that draws on multiple aesthetics beyond its specific postwar Japanese context. The form has multiplicity embedded in it.

Rail: I want to go back to the comment you made about irreverence. Why irreverence in dance-making and performing?

suzuki: Taking up irreverence can initiate additional questions about sincerity, which are related to my broader thematic interests in internet cultures. The internet has really shaped how many of us express sincerity. We’re prone to apathy via the internet, as we’re inundated with sensory output and content overload. In plot hole, I’m trying to follow the surreality and idiosyncrasies that such overload produces, charting a sort-of dream logic throughout the dance. But I am also interested in sincerity. If you aren’t sincere about the work, then why should anyone else be? Why should they care? Sincerity asks us to be present performing, viewing, and otherwise.

Rail: I was thinking about this dynamic between sincerity and apathy, or detachment, when I observed your rehearsal. You described a particular scene in plot hole as having a “deadpan affect,” which I interpreted as a pose of detachment, not unlike what the internet cultivates. This moment prompted me to think about the vulnerability that some dance audiences can ascribe to the live, dancing body. There’s an almost-expected sense of sincerity involved in dance, given its emphasis on the real-life, performing human, and I sometimes wonder if this implicitly limits what dance does or can do.

suzuki: In rehearsal, we’ve been experimenting with wearing sunglasses, which creates a sort-of mask and can ultimately lead to the construction of a dancing persona. The persona prompts physical changes, potentially leading to impulsive movement. I’m interested in exploring how the impetus to move emerges in a moment: you don’t know how or why you’re moving, but you’re responding to something, be it a subconscious impulse or an energy in the room. Deadpan, for me, is a framework for accessing those efforts.

But working in a form where the people are the instruments, so to speak, there is more emphasis on sincerity. You, as the performer, have the job of investing in the practice, and then audiences can decide whether they want to invest or not. The performance can also fail at being “detached,” pointing us toward its own shortcomings to explore more deeply the relationship between sincerity and apathy.

Rail: Where, then, does experimental dance reside on the axis of based to cringe?

suzuki: I think it’s pretty cringe. But I think that’s why I like it.

Rail: I am particularly interested in how the internet becomes a thematic and structural principle in your work. You’re not engaging with the internet as a mere space of dance distribution, nor are you literally connecting dance with technology. How do you understand the relationships between live performance and internet cultures? What is important to you in this process of connecting them or translating between?

suzuki: I’m an analogue choreographer making work about the internet, more aligned with post-internet artistic practices. I’m interested in synthesizing the signs and images we receive online and then re-presenting them in ways that are not immediately transparent. I’ve made scores composed of meme texts and images—for example, I made a score from a version of the popular meme caption “inside you there are two wolves,” one that accompanies six images. This kind of text-image combination becomes a choreographic structure.

In plot hole, we’re also specifically referencing the movie Spring Breakers (2012), directed by Harmony Korine, both thematically and using screenshotted visuals of the film to create choreography. I want to take things that are not very corporeal at first glance—internet artifacts—and then explore what they do to a body, or what they have the potential to do to a body. The internet does, of course, affect us physically: it erodes attention, gives us neck problems. There’s a choreography to the doomscroll of TikTok, and a specific sensation resulting from, for example, the experience of two hours disappeared while scrolling the app. Something like TikTok, or the internet generally, puts us in an unbodied place. I want to synthesize that into the more obviously embodied experience of dance.

Rail: Beyond the Korine reference, you also made references to ghosts throughout rehearsal. One score outlined that a “ghost enters” the hand of a dancer. Later, the dancer “feels a presence.” By what or whom are you and the dance haunted?

suzuki: I’m thinking about ghosts and haunting less in a “spooky” sense and more in terms of memory, both personal (like a photograph) or societal (like war). Haunting is a way of engaging with the world beyond more standard methods of knowing. And it also creates different potentials for movement—we can think about movement as initiating from an entrance or a glitch that points us toward something larger. It shows us that, through an apparent absence or vacancy, there is something that is already present. Mark Fisher has theorized these concepts in The Weird and the Eerie (2016). For me, the ghost could be a thing or a person, an idea, an electrical current, something that you said a few years ago, a photograph of a grandparent.

Rail: Recurrence accompanies haunting, as it happens multiple times over. The internet is a forever haunted apparatus, where there are constant recurrences and there is permanency—our posts never simply disappear. At the same time, the internet represents a constant archival churn. By the time we’ve had this conversation, many of our references will be outdated, if not obsolete. How are you navigating the temporality of the internet with the temporal boundness of live performance, as something that often occurs for its set evening-length duration?

suzuki: As you were speaking, I was thinking of the “digital footprint,” the traces of identity that remain from online activity. There’s an outline of a person bursting through the digital rubble—a person and a projection. In rehearsals, what opens up is a discussion of why we perform, the reasons we are engaging in this work altogether. I want to find moments of disconnect between performance and event, where wanting to perform comes more from an undercurrent of compulsion than a desire to present oneself in a specific way. The audience matters, but I want the audience to see the bugs scatter when the rock is turned over, rather than the bugs putting on a show.