Category: butoh teachers

May Butoh Non festival !

Are you ready? Early registration deadline quicky approaching for Yuko workshop, Frontier in Body, and many other opportunities to see and experience butoh / butô liveliness in Chicago!Short calendar of events:

May 1-4 Yuko Kaseki, Frontier in body, @OuterSpace Studios Register here

Friday, May 3 Yuko Kaseki, Shoot Geez My Gosh, @No Nation Tangential Unspace Gallery, 7pm Purchase tickets

Friday May 10 Jon Poindexter, Holly Chernobyl & Sara Zalek, The inside is not different than the outside@Museum of Surgical Science, 530pm Purchase tickets

Sunday May 12, 12-4pm Holly Chernobyl, Body + Imagination Workshop @OuterSpace Studios Register here

May 25-31 Tadashi Endo, Butoh Intensive Workshop/Performance Opportunity @OuterSpace Studios Register here

Friday, May 31 HAUTNAH, Student Performance, @OuterSpace Studios, 7pm Purchase tickets

Prepare Butoh Flowers, for May

Yuko Kaseki / Frontier in Body
Tadashi Endo / HAUTNAH

  • Concept/Sound collage/Dance: Yuko Kaseki Music: Kazuhisa Uchihashi, SUIT Artistic advisor: Lisa Stertz Light design: Roger Rossell Costume: Kahori Furukawa Photo: Dadaware This butoh performance is inspired by Henry Darger’s fantasy world that juxtaposes innocence with violence. Sounds from real battles found on the Internet are contrasted with iconic corporeal movements that represent innocence. The work attempts to pose a question to the feeling of ambivalence towards systematic violence that imposes powerlessness, and simultaneously reminds of brutal terror that characterizes our epoch. The birth to kill Build to break down Existence To be erased To be pasted The invisible enemy Imperceptible voice The other side of the filter The inside of the monitor In order to be fooled In order to deceive Endless game of The world
  • HA DÔ (waves movement) Photo: Maciej Rusinek
  • Tadashi Endo, Maboroshi
  • Tadashi Endo, IKIRU – Réquiem for Pina Bausch

Celebrating five years as an ad-hoc passion project, Butoh Chicago is proud to present disillusion/dissolution, a Butoh non festival in May, 2019. We will feature performances, workshops, and informal gatherings around Butoh for the month. Join us, won’t you?

Register for workshops Early:

May 1-4, 2019
Yuko Kaseki / Frontier in Body
Butoh Workshop
(REGISTER)

May 25-31, 2019
Tadashi Endo / Hautnah 
Butoh Workshop and Student Performance
(REGISTER)

more to come…subscribe to get up to date information here:

Butoh Workshops with Holly Chernobyl

Next up in the new year, Butoh: Body + Imagination Workshop

Saturday, January 5, 2019
4-8pm
Japanese Culture Center
1016 West Belmont Avenue, Chicago

In this 4 hour workshop, we will use and go beyond the 5 basic forms. Using center (hara/tanden/dantian) work and specific imagery, we dive deep into dancing butoh. You’ll learn different techniques for releasing tension to open physically and energetically. This class uses a combination of improv and technique. Finally, using embodied imagery, we create dances that can carry us and support our daily lives.

Instruction for butoh is instruction for life!

This class is for dancers, actors, martial artists, butoh artists or the butoh-curious. You do not need to have previous experience with butoh, but it helps. Whatever your circumstance, please show up ready to do your best!

Class is $45.00, you can order on Eventbrite

This workshop has a limited number of spaces available! Please register ASAP through the JCC office by emailing info@japaneseculturecenter.com or by calling the office directly.

Wear clothes that are easy to move in! Bring a water bottle. This workshop is open to all levels and abilities. Total newbies especially welcome!

From Holly: I am committed to creating an environment which is inclusive of many lived experiences and many abilities. That said, the center is not ADA accessible, unfortunately. Many apologies. This may change in the future.

Holly Chernobyl is a body-based performance artist. Holly has presented work in many Chicago spaces such as the Chicago Cultural Center, Links Hall, and Dfb Gallery. Her work has also been performed in Seattle at Velocity Dance Center, Brooklyn at JACK, and shown in Boston, Berlin, the UK, and Quebec. She continues to create solo pieces and collaborate with a talented array of Chicago artists. In 2016, she held four artist residencies, in rural Finland, Wisconsin, Germany, and at the Chicago Cultural Center.

Butoh Body- Ongoing class news

Hello butoh body enthusiasts~

Butoh Body has held a regular Sunday class from 12-2pm at OuterSpace Studios for six years! I am taking a necessary hiatus for the rest of the summer and want to express gratitude for your participation. This amazing network of students and teachers so curious about encountering our shadowy nature inspires me endlessly and seriously. I am humbled by all I have learned with you. Shoutouts to all the guest teachers, so thankful for everything you shared … Cristal Sabbagh, Wannapa Pimtong-Eubanks, Ginger Krebs, Holly Chernobyl, Mitsu Salmon, Carole McCurdy, Kiam Marcelo Junio, Eryka Dellenbach, Elaine Lemieux, Aurora Tabar, Adam Rose, Efrén Arcoiris, Rosé Hernandez, Laura Goldstein, Geoff Guy, per erez, ESP THANK YOU ❤

A new class will begin in the fall, at a new day and time. It will still be in OuterSpace Studios, and it will nurture safe space to explore the parts our selves that is searching and curious to go deeper into the unknown. Butoh Chicago will continue to post upcoming shows and classes that might interest you, and I hope to dance with you soon. More about Butoh Body..
In the meantime, enjoy your summer, radiant as you are!
all Love,
Sara

per erez swims in

Welcome this personal gift from the surrealist wellness gods ❤
Next UP: Sunday June 24, 12-2pm

per is a private practice based Yoga Therapist with an educational background in theatre arts. Per’s journey into learning Butoh dance have culminated as a perfect melting pot into which 30 years of his personal movement practice in yoga, tai chi, and bodywork all feel quite at home rubbing against each other. His earliest exposure to performance-visual arts included a fascination with physical theatre, Surrealism, and the writings of legendary artist, such as Jerzy Grotowski and Antonin Artaud.

Erez’s personal work in wellness has served him as a deep dive into the tantra of engaging our human bodies as a living intrapersonal, interpersonal, and impersonal experience– to be shared– through rituals of conscious movement. He has personally found that in these rituals, creative friction/frustration often catches fire, setting ablaze old notions that would separate healing from art, distinguish the body from the mind, or elevate a “higher self” beyond some mere mundane existence commonly experienced.

Aurora Tabar BB Guest

June 3 & 17
12-2pm
OuterSpace Studios, 1474 N. Milwaukee Ave.
$15 drop in, FREE with JIM Membership

EXPLODING STARS!

We warmly welcome Aurora back for another round of BB classes, her teaching is always thoughtful, direct, and impactful. She has a history of working with children, and it shows up in the most beautiful way. All Ages Welcome BTW 🙂

Aurora Tabar is a Chicago-based performing artist and occupational therapist. Her professional and creative practices examine the process of healing and the potential for transformation. She makes dance, theater, video, installations, and participatory public actions with others, and less often by herself. She was a 2012 LinkUp artist in residence at Links Hall in collaboration with Sara Zalek and more recently presented original work at the 2017 Battles:SS3 Post-Butoh Festival (Chicago, IL) in collaboration with Bill Skaleski and Duncan Reilly. Aurora received a 2017 Individual Artist Program grant through Chicago’s DCASE for her current project, The Existential Coat Check. Aurora works at Esperanza Community Services where she supports young people with developmental disabilities to become as independent as possible. She lives on the west side of Chicago with her partner, Kevin, and their two cats.
Website for my current project:existentialcoatcheck.com

Carole McCurdy BB Guest

May 27 & June 10
12-2pm
OuterSpace Studios, 1474 N. Milwaukee Ave.
$15 drop in, FREE with JIM Membership

Suspend, Glitch, Wobble, Fight, Surrender.

Steadily unsteady, redrawing and twanging our axial lines, we’ll be working with some ideas stolen from Mal de Debarquement Syndrome and Argentine Tango. Derangement will ensue.

Carole McCurdy is a Chicago-based artist who harnesses her nervous energy as a movement performer and visual artist. She received a 2016 Lab Artist award from the Chicago Dancemakers Forum and is a Fall 2016 Sponsored Artist at High Concept Laboratories. Her work addresses grief and anxiety, duty and resistance, and the absurd mysteries of embodiment. Last millennium she worked as a copy editor, but since then she’s been privileged to study with many masters of butoh dance, including Natsu Nakajima and Yoshito Ohno, and also with great teachers of Argentine tango. She has performed at spaces including the Chicago Cultural Center, Epiphany Dance, Links Hall, Hamlin Park, High Concept Laboratories, Defibrillator Gallery, and Movement Research (NY). In 2014 she danced under viaducts in downtown Chicago and then toured Indonesia with Nicole LeGette’s blushing poppy Dance Club. In 2008–09 she was awarded a six-month artistic residency at Links Hall, where she created and showed her ensemble piece Alas. For Redmoon Theater’s 2006 Twilight Orchard event in Columbus Park, McCurdy created A Cure for Scurvy, a performance installation one reviewer described as “an example of the way dread can be created virtually out of thin air.”

Check out her website!

per erez Eros un/Bound

Sunday May 20, 12-2pm
@OuterSpace Studios, 1474 N. Milwaukee Ave.

$15 drop in/ FREE with JIM Membership

per is a private practice based Yoga Therapist with an educational background in theatre arts. Per’s journey into learning Butoh dance have culminated as a perfect melting pot into which 30 years of his personal movement practice in yoga, tai chi, and bodywork all feel quite at home rubbing against each other. His earliest exposure to performance-visual arts included a fascination with physical theatre, Surrealism, and the writings of legendary artist, such as Jerzy Grotowski and Antonin Artaud.

Erez’s personal work in wellness has served him as a deep dive into the tantra of engaging our human bodies as a living intrapersonal, interpersonal, and impersonal experience– to be shared– through rituals of conscious movement. He has personally found that in these rituals, creative friction/frustration often catches fire, setting ablaze old notions that would separate healing from art, distinguish the body from the mind, or elevate a “higher self” beyond some mere mundane existence commonly experienced.

 

100 Light Years of Solitude

Wednesday, April 25 *One Night Only

Following Yumiko Yoshioka’s acclaimed solo “Before the Dawn”, this is the second part of her trilogy “From 1 to 100”. 100 Light Years of Solitude is inspired by Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” to explore a state of solitude Yumiko dances the life of a unique creature, born on a planet 100 light years away from ours. Imagining that this creature is the only one of its species on that planet, it enjoys unfolding its life until it realizes its destiny… to exist in solitude. Yumiko says, “In my childhood, I was always fascinated by the imaginary creatures and monsters of fairy tales. Butoh, a dance of metamorphosis, helps me to explore this imaginary world, and make something invisible visible.”

Direction/Choreography /Dance – Yumiko Yoshioka
Co-direction – Miguel Camarero
Costume – Pablo Alarcon
Light design/ technical direction – Spiros Paterakis
Music composition – Tomas Tello/ Zam Johnson

7:00pm @Links Hall, 3111 N. Western Ave.
Get tickets early!

Interested in learning more about Butoh?

Check out Yumiko’s workshops at the Japanese Culture Center April 19-22

Make the Brutal Tender

Eryka Dellenbach leads Butoh Body March 18 & 25 12-2pm @OuterSpace Studios $15 walk in, or FREE with JIM membership

In this 2-part workshop we will consider the ‘threshold’ as both a personal or subjective limit[ation], and as a border between that-which-is and that-which-is-not. In part through repertoire born out of Eryka’s present performance project, entitled Make the Brutal Tender, we will attempt to explore the qualifiers tender and brutal corporeally, and learn directly from the body using what is immediately available to us:

Physical Space: Floor, Wall
Body: Ours and other’s
Energy: Ours and other’s

Accompanied by sound artist Hanna Elliot (HOGG, Goad Deimos), she will lead us through simple and greatly variable exercises that will allow us to cultivate miniature, sensual (as opposed to verbal) dialogues around comfort and discomfort, pain, impulse, effort, nurture and hopefully, fear. In addition to butoh, activities in the workshops are also culled from her experience in capoeira, flying low, flamenco and play-fighting techniques, and reinterpreted.

Everyone is welcome! These workshops are about exploring your own threshold(s).

Please wear comfortable clothing. We will work barefoot.

*Alternative tasks can always be provided for those who wish to work alone during partnering exercises.

The Threshold:
The brink of being a thing (border, barely)
The limit of a thing (capacity, furthest)

MA間 :
Space between objects
Silence between sounds = ‘palpable absence’, ‘pregnancy’, ‘potential’
Stillness between movements

Sillage:
Lingering scent
Impression left in a sheet or pillow

Link to Make the Brutal Tender project: https://www.makethebrutaltender.com/
Link to Hanna Elliot’s music: http://www.thebrvtalist.com/hogg/