Listening to the Bones: The Body as Instrument and Offering

One Night Only Butoh Workshop by Seattle Butoh artist Vanessa Skantze
@2130 W. 21st Street, 6-9pm just $30. RSVP to butohchicago@gmail.com to attend!

The body dancing Butoh asks of itself absolute presence and utter surrender. In Listening to the Bones, Vanessa will guide a revelation of the body as instrument through the practice of deep listening and becoming other. Creating a space of curiosity and trust while fostering intense physical/mental focus, the workshop will: facilitate awareness of the concurrent structural and energetic alignment of the body; explore limits of flexibility and strength, speed and stillness, instability and ground; work in pairs to develop listening beyond the skin; and invoke imagery to be absorbed into the body– creating the offering of Butoh dance.

“Butoh is a corpse standing straight up in a desperate bid for life” Tatsumi Hijikata

“To translate the invisible wind through the water it sculpts in passing”. – Robert Bresson

Vanessa Skantze is a Butoh artist and teacher of yoga and dance from Seattle. She has performed in the U.S. and Europe for over 20 years. She co-founded New Orleans sound/movement ensemble Death Posture in 2002, and collaborates with many renowned musicians including Jarboe and percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani. Skantze has trained with Jinen Butoh founder Atsushi Takenouchi since 2003, and performed with him in the U.S. and Europe. Since coming to Seattle in 2004 she has created numerous ensemble works under the name Danse Perdue as well as solo pieces. In 2013 she taught as part of Lydia Lunch’s Post-Catastrophe Collaborative. In 2014 her work ‘Radiant Poison” was performed by a quartet of dancers at the UWABE festival in Asheville, N.C. She is currently touring a new work, ‘Metempsychosis’, to original sound by Kris Force.