GODDAMN BEAUTY

This program presents three interconnected works by Daniel Proietto, exploring identity, embodiment, and resistance through film and live performance.

The program opens with Becoming Natsue, a film that traces the ritual preparation of the Onnagata — the male performer of female roles in Kabuki. Here, transformation is not an illusion of gender, but an act of presence: each gesture, each layer of costume and makeup, a call to the unseen. In a world where the sacred resides in all things — as shaped by Shinto and Buddhist ways of knowing — the body becomes a vessel through which memory, spirit, and story pass.
As an outsider to this tradition, Proietto approaches the ritual with humility, conscious that his gestures and make-up do not aim for technical perfection, but for a human act of offering and respect — honoring the space where the sacred and the imperfect meet.

This leads into Natsue, a solo in the Nihon Buyō tradition, specially choreographed for Proietto by Kanjuro Fujima VIII, one of the greatest choreographers and composers of Kabuki theatre today. Natsue was originally created as the second act of Simulacrum — a duet by Alan Lucien Øyen for the legendary Flamenco master Shoji Kojima and Proietto. In this rare and intimate work, Proietto embodies the figure of Shoji’s mother — a real person, drawn from Shoji’s own life. This is an unusual gesture in the world of traditional Japanese dance, where characters are most often drawn from fiction, myth, or distant history. The piece was first performed alongside Shoji himself, in a moving dialogue across generations and forms.
In the film version presented here, Proietto dances Natsue alone, beneath a storm — an unprecedented image in the history of Nihon Buyō: the form, traditionally confined to the stage, here set against the elements, the dancer soaked by rain, each gesture charged with fragile, elemental presence.

The program culminates in Goddamn Beauty, a radically reimagined solo performance by Proietto, created in response to the brutal violence faced by transgender and transsexual communities in Argentina — an act of embodied defiance and remembrance. This new version will premiere with live music by Tsubasa Hori — renowned Japanese percussionist and composer, known for blending traditional Taiko drumming, koto, voice, and experimental sound. Her presence brings a visceral, ritual energy to the work.

Goddamn Beauty is loosely inspired by Kinjiki (Forbidden Colors) — the first Butoh piece created by Tatsumi Hijikatain 1959, itself drawn from Yukio Mishima’s novel exploring homosexuality in postwar Japan. Where Kinjiki gave voice to one of the most vulnerable and marginalized groups of its time, Goddamn Beauty asks: who are the most vulnerable among us today?
In Argentina, the average life expectancy of transgender individuals is just 36 years — a stark measure of structural violence and social exclusion. Against this reality, Goddamn Beauty becomes a personal and political invocation — an assertion of presence and dignity through movement.

Drawing from Butoh — the Japanese dance theatre form born of postwar trauma and existential inquiry — Goddamn Beauty confronts systemic violence and cultural erasure. Through raw movement and uncompromising presence, the piece asserts the right to exist, to be seen, and to burn against the structures that seek to erase. In witnessing this act of embodied defiance, the audience is asked to confront not only the violence done to others, but the structures within which they themselves live.

Together, these works form a deeply embodied inquiry into how performance can serve as remembrance, resistance, and radical affirmation.