The Angel of History - a multimedia event and butoh performance

The Angel of History

After Walter Benjamin

At the PHILADELPHIA ASSOCIATION

Can we redeem the past? Do catastrophe and redemption go hand in hand?

A talk/performance by Manu Bazzano

Followed by discussion with a special guest

Renowned butoh performer and teacher Marie-Gabrielle Rotie writes:

"I have known Manu Bazzano for many years. He has been studying Butoh with me, and a few others, for a very long time. I strongly recommend this performance. There are so many 'butoh' people out there, of questionable quality, but I urge you to go and see this one - finally a peformer who is not replicating the 'moth-eaten' tropes of Butoh but has found their own way

Walter Benjamin's IX Thesis of History reads:

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

PHILADELPHIA ASSOCIATION, 4 Marty's Yard, London, United Kingdom