A Perfect Circle Meets Japanese Butoh: New York Choreographer Vangeline Takes Center Stage in New Music Video

Japanese Butoh: New York Choreographer Vangeline

 

A Perfect Circle Meets Japanese Butoh: New York Choreographer Vangeline Takes Center Stage in New Music Video

The acclaimed artist brings her haunting movement vocabulary to “To Whom It May Concern,” bridging alternative rock, Japanese dance, and the transformative power of performance.

What happens when the dark, atmospheric sound of alternative rock meets the hypnotic movement of Japanese Butoh? The answer unfolds in A Perfect Circle’s new music video, “To Whom It May Concern,” featuring New York–based choreographer and dancer Vangeline, whose work has spent decades exploring the relationship between the human body, emotion, and the unconscious mind.

The video, created by Rizz, features Vangeline performing her solo Butoh Beethoven, introducing the experimental dance form to an audience more familiar with rock music than avant-garde choreography.

Co-founded by Billy Howerdel and Maynard James Keenan, A Perfect Circle has occupied a distinctive place in alternative rock for more than two decades. Its debut album, Mer de Noms (2000), made chart history, followed by Thirteenth Step (2003), eMOTIVe (2004) and Eat the Elephant (2018). The new single, the band's first new music since 2018, arrives ahead of an extensive 2027 North American tour. 

For Vangeline, the collaboration is another example of Butoh's ability to move beyond conventional theatrical spaces.

Originating in postwar Japan, Butoh developed as a radical form of dance that challenged established ideas of beauty, movement and the body's expressive possibilities. Often characterized by deliberate, extraordinarily slow movement and unsettling physical imagery, the form asks audiences to reconsider what the body can reveal about memory, identity and human vulnerability.

Vangeline has built an international career around those questions.

As founder and artistic director of Vangeline Theater/New York Butoh Institute, she has devoted her practice to preserving Butoh's artistic legacy while expanding its contemporary possibilities. Her all-female dance company combines choreography with social activism, while the New York Butoh Institute Festival and Queer Butoh provide platforms for women and LGBTQ+ artists working within the form.

Her commitment to inclusion extends well beyond the stage. Through The Dream a Dream Project, now in its 18th year, Vangeline brings Butoh to incarcerated individuals in New York State correctional facilities, using movement as a means of expression, reflection, and personal transformation.

That intersection of art and human experience also informs her scientific investigations. Her project The Slowest Wave, supported by a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts dance award, explored the relationship between Butoh and neuroscience, including a pioneering study measuring the dance form's effects on the brain.

Her book, Butoh: Cradling Empty Space, further examines those connections, approaching movement not simply as performance but as a means of understanding consciousness.

Vangeline's choreography has traveled internationally, with presentations across Europe, Asia and the Americas. Her work has earned recognition from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Gibney Dance and the Society of Antiquaries of London, while her screen appearances include Jay Anania's 2012 film The Letter, starring James Franco and Winona Ryder.

Musical collaborations are hardly unfamiliar territory. She has previously worked with Grammy-winning artist Esperanza Spalding, electronic musician Skrillex, and David J of Bauhaus, demonstrating the adaptability of Butoh across musical genres.

The current chapter of her career is particularly active. In August 2026, she premiered NAIAD METAL at Lincoln Center, a commissioned work staged around the Milstein Reflecting Pool that explored the relationship between the human body, water and architecture. 

She has also been appointed an Associate Fellow at Wadham College, University of Oxford, for the 2026–2027 academic year, an opportunity that brings her artistic practice into conversation with academic research and interdisciplinary scholarship. 

Her career reflects an enduring conviction: that the body can communicate what language sometimes cannot.

And in “To Whom It May Concern,” A Perfect Circle offers that philosophy a different kind of stage, placing an unconventional dance tradition inside the visual world of contemporary alternative rock.

For an artist who has spent her career challenging the boundaries of movement, the collaboration feels like a natural extension of her work.

For more information about Vangeline, her performances, educational programs, and the New York Butoh Institute, visit www.vangeline.com.