Classic butoh by the master Sankai Juku company at Sadler’s Wells: Kinkan Shonun is from 1978, while Toki is relatively recent (2005). To watch Sankai Juku is to be immersed in a wholly other world. A world that is visually stunning, filled with stylised movements, hidden meanings, hierarchy and ritual.

Kinkan Shonun saw the emaciated semi-naked dancers go through a series of seven scenes. Highlighted images rise out of a sea of dark strange dreams, where one felt that everything should make sense, but nothing does: a soldier, dishevelled, dusty, conjuring pictures of desolation and war, playing between rigid machine-like movements and intense softness, manically eats sand; four masked men with half-destroyed faces wind across the stage in sinuous homo-erotic movements; two dancers wrestling tenderly move up and down, open mouths a few inches apart; a stunted dwarf-like figure, smiling, moving across the stage as though doing a clown routine; a peacock (live) is danced with and released (and remains, wandering aimlessly and ignored, on stage the whole show).

After a while it takes a lot of concentration to stay with it, and when the fabulous ending image comes, a man hanging upside down from a red triangle against a blue background with six bowed figures in front, it is a great relief!

In Toki, which featured a visually stunning set of pillars, the ritualistic element was heightened. The master Ushio Agamatsu’s solo, with its cramped supplicating repetitive gestures had a beautiful ending as a wave of cloth followed him off stage, an image worthy of the great Lindsay Kemp.