‘Homage’s’ Powerful Butoh Picture

LOS ANGELES —  French dancer-choreographer Christine Quoiraud-Levresse used the unsparing concentration and intensity of butoh in an unusually selfless manner during a solo program titled “Principle of Uncertainty: Homage to Magritte” at La Boca downtown on Sunday.

Working in narrow shafts of light extending from the audience to the back wall, she resourcefully evoked the isolated body parts and disturbing foreground-and-background juxtapositions that dominate the paintings of Belgian Surrealist Rene Magritte.

In stark white makeup, and restlessly bending, twisting and reaching in textbook butoh cycles of mutability, she could look monstrous when close to the audience (her huge shadow taking up the entire back wall) or dangerously frail when huddled against a far window under giant slide projections of dangling hands and feet.