Movement Direction Portfolio

Marie-Gabrielle is the UK's leading Butoh exponent and has an international reputation as a performer, choreographer and workshop teacher. She has been engaged in training actors and dancers in HE and in the industry for the past 30 years. *
Her pedagogy is highly specialist, unique and at the same time, she has evolved fully accessible and transferable methodologies across ages, abilities, and levels of expertise. Her workshops attract people from the ages of eighteen to over eighty.
Her research methodology informing her movement practice stems from an earlier career as a soloist, creating works drawing from embodied archetypes, an interest in the relation between painting and performance, and the carving of an aesthetic informed by her prior training as a visual artist. This honed visual aesthetic of her choreographic and movement work makes it eminently suitable for film and TV work.

Key research questions in her choreographic works centre on:
Questions of Transformation:
How does the performer enact transformation and become something 'other'?
How does the performer enter into 'states of unconscious movement' and find that their body is moved by unseen forces?
How does the performer become space?
How does the performer investigate 'becoming nothing/becoming something?'
Is it possible for the performer to transform into the non-human and what might be the implications for the post-human, non-anthropocentric and for ecological thinking?
How does the performer play with time and in Butoh specifically how might space/time, as embodied in the concept of MA open up a dialogue with approaches to scenography, film frames, site-specific and ecological theatre practice?

''As a choreographer I am particularly interested in the performative relation to the film frame and how the composite of physical presence plus celluloid might then create its own intersections of space/time (see Parys Mountain).
I bring this choreographic research and awareness of movement and space/time to my collaborations with film Directors. '' (MGR, 2024)

Her work spans movement direction for The National Theatre, Royal Shakespeare Company, Fringe and mainstream theatre companies, Dancers, Hollywood Actors on film and TV as well as classical actors. Selected works include:

2023: NOSFERATU Rotie was personally requested by Director Robert Eggers (releases UK 2025) and mainly worked with Lily Rose Depp and Bill Skarsgard (vampire) on choreography of idiosyncratic movement linked to their respective characters. This movement direction work has strong roots in her solo research for Mythic, Black Mirror, and in the research workshop States of Possession.

2022: THE WITCHER SERIES 3: Episode 5 (Netflix, first screened June 2023). Rotie worked with the entire main cast inventing a ball room dance called the ‘melange’ which was a mix of tango meets Renaissance Quadrille. The research drew upon my interest in the occult and in dance formations mixed with a choreographic ‘collage technique’ drawn from my Butoh background.

2020: THE NORTHMAN Rotie was head-hunted by the director Robert Eggers to create choreography and movement direction for The Northman (premiered 2022). She worked with following main Cast: Alexander Skarsgard, Anya Taylor Joy, Willem Dafoe, stunts and extras. The movement research drew upon my extensive interest in human/animal transformation, Butoh, states of possession, paganism.

Recent selected other engagements include:
• Dancing the darkness: Butoh Shakespeare and the Macabre: workshop for Flabbergast Theatre. October, Poplar Union, London, 2020

• Bodies on the Shoreline: Breath, Step, Presence: Investigations of migration, refugees, displacement and arrivals via research workshop, London, November 3rd to 6th, in collaboration with Goze Saner. 2016

• Butoh and the Art of Slow: ‘Slow Cooker Series 6’ workshop in City Moves, Aberdeen, produced and curated by sonADA, with Imogen Newland. 2016

• Summer Intensive: Performance Practices,
Palermo Artists leading specialist workshops include David Coulter, Maja Mitić, Marie-Gabrielle Rotie and the project director Anna Furse. 20 - 25 July 2015

• Workshop leader for NISDA (National Independent Schools Drama Association), Taunton, July 2012.

• Personal Movement Director for actor Greg Hicks in Richard lll, Arcola Theatre, London, 2017

• Inhaler, The Foals, pop video (choreography), 2012.
• Guest Movement Coach/Training for War Horse, National Theatre, 2011.

• Sir Peter Hall's production of Bacchae at Olivier Stage, Royal National Theatre 2002 and toured to Theatre Royal Newcastle-upon -Tyne and Epidavros in Greece. Music by Sir Harrison Birtwistle. I was responsible for overall choreography, daily actor training and workshop training with Masks. Master Butoh training for lead actor Greg Hicks.
• Since 1997 she has also produced over 60 workshops and numerous festivals for her company Butoh UK (www.butohuk.com). Many of these attract students, professional actors, dancers, performance artists and those just interested in movement.

* For article on my training of classical actors in Butoh see: Calamoneri, Tanya. "Dancing Hamlet in a World of Frogs: Butoh and the Actor's Inner Landscape." Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 7.3 (2016): 375-88. Web.