QUASIMODO is a free Butoh dance adaptation of Victor Hugo's universal literary work, Notre-Dame de Paris. Musically, we recover the organ as one of the most symbolic and forgotten instruments of Western European music (with all its religious connotations) to merge it into Butoh dance, one of the most avant-garde manifestations of contemporary art.

The organ / butoh combination makes QUASIMODO a chimerical work, between the avant-garde and the baroque.
The play was premiered in 2016 at the Church of Santa Madrona in Barcelona and presented at Konvent 0.

QUASIMODO also investigates performance and mask theatre (influence of the Noh Theatre).

Photography - justinpbrown71

ARTISTS
Original Idea: ORLANDO WHALES & KEIKO FUJIIE
Dance: ORLANDO WHALES
Live Music & Composition: KEIKO FUJIIE
Lights: RUTH MORATA
Photography: justinpbrown71
Video: JORDI ARQUÉ

SYNOPSIS

This Butoh Dance and Oneiric Theatre piece delves into the duality of the romance between beauty and ugliness and the impossibility of reconciling these polarities through the tragic history of its characters. QUASIMODO's body is deformed, it is 'almost human'. Recollect bodies that have undergone malformations due to genetic causes, wars or accidents.

The work explores the possibilities of movement of these broken bodies that society marginalizes and condemns for being different. Where then is the sense of beauty? Can a tragic body express beauty in its semi-human dance?