BAM BAM BOOM____Post/butoh WorKshops May 27-30, 2025
dancing-being-in-time, Min Yoon’s SOLO Performance May 31, 7pm
Links Hall, 3111 N. Western Ave, Chicago, IL
Workshop Schedule
Tuesday, May 27, 1:30pm-5pm
Wednesday, May 28, 1:30pm-5pm
Thursday, May 29, 6:30pm-10pm
Friday, May 30, 6:30pm-10pm
Sunday, June 1, 6pm Links Hall. Student Performance. FREE
Butoh ritual performance for workshop participants. Open to the public, a night of celebrating community and togetherness in dialog around violence.
Saturday, May 31, 2025
7pm Dancing-being-in-time
Links halL
bam bam boom ____
Min Yoon’s post/butoh workshop
///What does it mean to dance ~ with impulses of rupture, love, subtle and global disruptions… violence… not as destruction, but as natural impulses, process, and transformation? Finding space and metaphors for pain that is pained again, fragmented and replayed grief, rage against injustice, long exhaustion from defense that turns into something hard and twisted — is there movement, connection, and healing as a natural impulse from our bodies?
Dancing with impulses
Of rupture & love
Hardcore, Softness surrounding
Surrendering
Explosive taste buds
Impulses growing
Loud Numb
Bam Bam Boom
In this Butoh dance workshop experience, we will explore the body as a site of questioning and researching, where the internal, relational, and in the group body — can be explored, confronted, expressed, and move to something else _________? Using the language of the expressive arts with butoh dance, somatics, nature, philosophy, and conflict studies… we’ll dance as a way of knowing… Is gentleness and care the dance needed for our times of polarity and awareness of violence around the world? What is the dance needed in a world of constant microaggressions, polarized thought, and suppressed emotions? There will be guided improvisation, reflective dialogue, and Butoh’s raw, poetic movement language, we will move with trajectories of emotion and dance between opposing truths. Dance with vulnerability, and experiment with our relationship with, next to various human tendencies, and find new patterns in how we can move alone and with one another.
Deeply Playful. Fun.
Strange kinds of Beauty.
I see You. You see Me.
All bodies are welcome, interested in exploring depths with movement. Practices are open for all levels of experience and differently-abled bodies.
dancing-being-in-time
Saturday, May 31 7PM
post/butoh dance + vocals performance by Min Yoon
“Not for the attention-seeking economy”, a slow evolution over the span of years is compressed into this single hour. It enters the body as a living archive of pain: What impulses have been inherited, imposed, or reclaimed? How is pain danced in the same body across time?
The voice amplifies and permeates the silent screams of the body into sonic spells, into an opening. Like looking into the eyes of someone who understands, across memories, across invisible barriers of the body, beneath the skin — where impulses will not remain silent.
Motion stretches and fractures, tracing the invisible weight of memory, the tension between forgetting and remembering. Between presence and absence, between what is seen and what is felt, Dancing-Being-in-Time invites the audience into a space where movement and sound reveal what words cannot—where experience unfolds not in narrative, but in the textures of time itself.
This dance research and performance is supported by Tanzmit Festival, DIS-TANZ SOLO Funding – Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media in the NEUSTART KULTUR program, DIS-TANZEN aid program of the Dachverband Tanz Deutschland, Germany.
Opening musical set by Liv Mershon and special guests Wannapa P. Eubanks and Sara Zalek improvising movement.
About Liv: Through stylistic shifts and multimedia, Liv Mershon‘s work blurs the line between real and fantastic, exploring the emotional, absurd, painful, and beautiful at once. Her musical performances journey as dreams do, drawing chaotic narrative toward spiritual integration- with tones and textures that penetrate. Mershon is a Chicago based artist who performs with the harsh ambient duo, nunn, and co-organizes the Tierras Sonidas Sonic Rodeo in Marfa, TX. She recorded and produced nunn’s releases- distributed by Damien Records, Trouble in Mind Records, and Death Bed Tapes.
Wannapa Pimtong-Eubanks is a *Butoh Artist, choreographer, movement coach, improviser, and actor. Her work often stems from a personal experience or a specific memory that grows into a poetic image that she imbues with the memory of the moment. From 2010-2021, Wannapa had been a former Artistic member of Erasing the Distance, a non-profit arts organization based in Chicago that uses the power of performance to disarm stigma, spark dialogue, educate, and promote healing surrounding issues of mental health. Since then, she has been passionately focusing on exploring relationship between mental condition and movement. Her recent work, she was a Butoh dancer in Harlan Rosen’s “Arboring:Winter” in March 2025, and Ivan-Daniel Espinosa’s “BOWELS OF THE EARTH” in the NextGen Butoh Lovers Showcase in April, 2025. Stay tune for more of her upcoming Butoh performances this Summer. “I’m so excited and looking forward to dancing with the awesome Sara, and Liv (musician & performer). Especially, I’d love to dedicate tonights performance to Links Hall.”
About Min Yoon
With post/butoh dance, vocals, and conflict studies, Min makes intimate, surreal, and psychosomatic performances and experimental moments to create moments of heightened complex / relational emotions, permission to go there, go deep, and look for what is emerging now. Min explores difficult truths beyond language, and against inherited social knowledge, through researching and dancing with unintentional/subconscious movements within impulsive improvisation, physicality, and stillness.
“Not for the attention-seeking economy”, Min’s butoh+ experimental dance and vocal works process what feels more subconscious and unknown in being human such as around pain and violence, to grieve, reveal nuanced truths around the depths of emotions, experiences, and perspectives, and look for new expressions. Recent works switch between researching violence with their own body and the bodies of others. Their current solo work dancing-being-in-time depicts loops of movements, vocal tremors, and memories, with the body as an archive of pain, states, and transformation. In dancing with violence, they researched the bodily memories of violence of another dancer to create an auditory theater piece that invites the listeners to move and lightly embody the experiences poetically. In choreographic experiments, they question what are the images, imaginations, and group archetypes we need for our times, how bodies respond and move together unintentionally in groups, and how we may find instinctual ways to move together beyond how our bodies were trained.
Min describes their method as Butoh / post/butoh / Butoh, as they bring together methods of butoh dance with somatics and conflict studies, and social questions. Min continues to dance with the question of whether butoh dance is mimicking patterns of oppression (+ what attracts us to certain art and media), and… what is the dance needed today.
Min’s performances and social artworks have been funded by NATIONALES PERFORMANCE NETZ (npn) in Germany, Dachverband Tanz Deutschland, Kultuuri Kaupilla in Finland, The City of Oakland, The Battery Club of San Francisco, and the Awesome Foundation, with other artist residencies and grants. Min has also been a fellow at Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (ZK/U Berlin) and an artcorps scholar at the Tamalpa Institute founded by Daria and Anna Halprin.
More about the workshop format
Butoh dance started as a way of processing all the deaths after WWII. As my teacher shares, we dance to dance with the nature that makes us, All. Hoping that this workshop experience will be a new remix of ancient, natural, and the now with the paradoxes of being with the possibilities of expansion with connections to human nature and the depths and layers and new emerging with emotions, beauty, atrocities, personal, world, relational, and imagined new fields. This workshop experience is a love letter for living and moving with the process, mystery, experimenting with old and evolving values with our social realities, inner worlds and imagination, …
Butoh dance and the expressive arts allows for a poetic and philosophical distance at times, that allows us to have awareness of the emotional and physical sensations, different from directly confronting with words and media on challenging themes. This workshop is coming from the lineage of butoh dance that started post WWII, of bodies in rebellion and art exploring what is at the edges and less acceptable in society.
To create a safe, brave, and supportive spaces, there will be times for reflecting and talking to share and integrate. There will be attention to going slow at times and creating space for feeling and thinking, as well as an intention for the beauty of dance and the arts in a temporary community, to carry the collective emotions.
With an intentional and strong container, this will be a place for artistic processing, and not therapy, although there are connections between art and healing. People who are in current intense needs for 1:1 support are encouraged to work with personal therapists. We will encourage community support and Min, as a certified somatic therapist and educator, will be open to talk during some of the breaks.
About Links Hall
There is no easy way to say this.
With heavy hearts, we share with you that our board of directors has voted to sunset the organization at the end of this current fiscal year, June 30, 2025.
This decision was made after several years of struggling to balance the cash needs to operate Links Hall and the funding reality after years of diminished foundation and government support. At the end of last year, with the unexpected loss of another general operating grant, we launched a 5-month public effort to fundraise to stabilize the organization and address a cash flow emergency. Our community showed up and supported us, helping us raise half of our goal. This was tremendous but also reinforced the funding ceiling we continuously hit. Across the early years of the COVID pandemic, two leadership and staff changes, we worked to stabilize. Amidst a rapidly shrinking arts funding climate and today’s economic reality, the financial challenges that lay ahead are simply too great to survive. Our options are few, our capacity is diminished, and with another looming cash flow gap on the horizon, this time months-wide, we feel the most responsible decision to make is to sunset.
We are making this decision now so that we can close with integrity and dignity, connected in community, and with the ability to properly honor and ensure the archive of the almost-50 year legacy of this beloved organization. We have all experienced the trauma of sudden endings. As much as we are able, we want this to be softer, with enough time and space to hold everything our community needs us to hold.
We are determined to finish out our current season and commitments to artists through June 30th.
We are committed to doing this together, in relationship and community.
What we know
- Programming through June 30, 2025 at Links Hall will continue. Our team will then take the month of July to move out.
- To finish out the season, ensure a thorough archiving process, and support staff transitions, we will need to raise an additional $65,000. While we anticipate securing a portion of these funds behind the scenes, we will soon share an updated funding goal for our Lifeline for Links campaign to capture the adjusted amount.
What we do not know
- What, exactly, is going to happen to the space after we are out. Constellation and Mike Reed are interested in stewarding some of the long term Links Legacy programs forward and supporting the transition for renters. This is all still taking shape and we will share plans once they’re in place.
We are deeply grateful for the support we’ve received from individuals, collectives, partner organizations, and funders since we launched our Lifeline for Links campaign in October 2024. Thank you to everyone who donated money, connected us to a new person, held a fundraiser, shared our link, and emailed their networks. Thank you for all of it.
This collective support and love for Links Hall helped keep us financially and spiritually afloat this season. While we had all hoped that we could meet our full goal, we are so grateful for how much everyone gave across this campaign, and across the years at Links Hall.
Please know this decision comes after years of strategic discussions and in-depth debate, after exploring every single possibility. The exhaustion of the staff and board after such a long, sustained effort to steady the organization is also an important factor in these current conditions.
All this to say, we know this news is devastating and we are also devastated.
We want to ritualize this ending in June. We want to create space for people to come together to grieve, connect, rage, dance, celebrate, and say goodbye to the organization that is Links Hall as we know it. We want this ritual to be beautiful and significant. A celebration of life.
We hope to organize and formally announce this event soon.
Our offering: Let’s do this together.
Endings are transformations.
May Links Hall closing create fertile soil for Chicago performance to seed and grow in new ways. May we free up resources for other performance spaces and inspire new maps of connection. May this moment incite funders to double down on their support of small, experimental arts organizations and the independent artists and collectives that give breath to this city.
Founded in 1978 by Bob Eisen, Carol Bobrow, and Charlie Vernon, Links Hall remarkably defied the odds to serve thousands upon thousands of artists over the course of nearly 50 years. From humble beginnings, to a singular legacy of fostering experimental work in Chicago, Links survived and fulfilled its mission for longer than anyone might have expected. We offer gratitude to the lineage of stewards who ensured this remarkable run: Michael Zerang, Asimina Chremos, CJ Mitchell, Sandy Gerding, Roell Schmidt, Paul Teruel, and Stephanie Pacheco amongst many others. Thank you to Ginger Farley and Bob Shapiro, Linda Solotaire, Marie Casimir, Rachel Damon, Erica Mott, Anna Trier, Felicia Holman, Jan Erkert, Katie Collins, Brett Swinney, Aaliyah Christina, Giau Truong, Mario LaMothe, Dana Pepowski, and countless more arts workers that have helped carry Links Hall forward over the years.
May the impact of this 50-year organization continue to reverberate out into our collective performance communities for the greatest benefit of all.
Butoh Curious Chi 