Category: butoh teachers

Holly Chernobyl – Butoh Workshops

“There are as many ways to do butoh as there are flowers in the world.”

This month it’s happening Saturday, June 16 6:30pm-8:30pm, but this is a regularly scheduled event at the Japanese Culture Center. The two hour workshop focuses on the method developed by one of the founders of Butoh, Tatsumi Hijikata and is taught by Holly Chernobyl, transformer and instigator of dark matter. This method of exploration is firmly grounded in the body, utilizes imagery, and prioritizes form over feeling.

Class is $15.00

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.

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/

per erez drops in

Welcome this personal gift from the surrealist wellness gods ❤
Next UP: Sunday March 11, 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.

https://www.facebook.com/plugins/post.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fphoto.php%3Ffbid%3D1721825857849730%26set%3Da.352084788157184.84259.100000669980876%26type%3D3&width=500

Yumiko Yoshioka BODY RESONANCE

Body Resonance
The body as a receptacle of time.
A dance of metamorphosis inevitably appears.


The main focus of this workshop is a conscious research in the unification of our body/mind/soul, so that we can deeply enjoy the intrinsic process of metamorphosis through the spirit of dance. Through a continuous exploration of our past collective memories, we can strike a vein of abundant creative resources, enriching the essence of our life.

Body resonance is a key to opening up the doors of an ever-changing world inside and outside ourselves, which helps the body to unfold its secrets, holding them up until they shine and tremble. Everything is in resonance with each other. Through a dialogue with our body, we can learn to be moved by inner and outer forces, thus realizing we are a part of the Universe.

@ Japanese Culture Center, 1016 West Belmont Avenue

2018 Workshop Dates:
Thursday/ Friday April 19/20, 12-5pm
Saturday April 21, 1-7pm
Sunday April 22, 5:30-9:30pm

Eventbrite - Yumiko Yoshioka - 2018 Chicago Workshop

Workshop Content:
*Release exercises, inspired by Noguchi Taiso (Gymnastics), Taichi and Yoga
*breathing exercises
*dynamic training for the flow of energy
*Butoh-related work to activate our universal memories (sensitization, combination of image and movement with antenna exercises such as figure of 8, water ball, animal, insect, snake, witch and fairy, the creatures inside us, hanging body, walking, dialogue with a partner etc)
*structured improvisation, free association

Yumiko Yoshioka
Dancer, choreographer, teacher, art director
Born in Tokyo, residing in Germany since 1988

More about Yumiko.

Thanks to our partners for helping to make it happen ❤

JAF_Logo-v1 (1)Japanese Culture Center (JCC Logo) (1)

 

Mitsu Salmon February 18

Butoh Body
Sunday Feb 18, 12-2pm
1474 N. Milwaukee Ave.
$15 

“How are our ancestors held and released in our body? Ancestries of plants, animals, and humans.” Mitsu

Mitsu’s class will draw from Butoh, contemporary dance, and
experimental theater, exploring the connection with body, unconscious
and imagery.

The class will focus on body-weather, Noguchi, mythical creatures and
sultry hands through guided imagery and structured improvisation.
All levels welcome and please wear comfortable clothing.

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Mitsu Salmon creates original performance and dance work. She studied Butoh and has been part of a Butoh company, Ima Tenko and Kiraza, for 3 years in Japan. She studied dance and experimental theater in New York and Berlin for a number of years and has performed and taught workshops internationally.  She has performed solo work at places such Links Hall, HCL, Performance Space 122, Dance Theater Workshop, Highways Performance Space and internationally at Hebbel Am Uffer, the Berlin Performance Art Festival, London Performance Art Festival and Urbanguild in Kyoto, Japan. Learn more on www.mitsusalmon.com.

 

Body Tales – Jakob Maché

Based on the assumptions of various cultural traditions and neuroscience, this workshop aims at awakening old trans-generational memories buried in our bodies and let our bodies narrate it with its own gestures. Our focus lies hereby on our center, the enteric nervous system controlling our bowels, which acts like our brains autonomously. In order to deeply connect with ourselves and our dancing partners through our collective unconscious, we employ Katsugen Undo exercises, fundamental floor work from contact improvisation, atomic shakes and other techniques.

Friday, March 2 3-6pm
Saturday, March 3 12-3pm
@OuterSpace Studios, 1474 N. Milwaukee Ave.

Eventbrite - Body Tales. Jakob Maché

Registration $36/day, or $65 for both days.

The workshop is open to anybody who is ready to explore the whole depth of our existence. Jakob will also be performing at a ONE NIGHT ONLY event March 3 at Elastic Arts, Chicago, Yelling at the Dark!

Jakob Maché was born in Vienna, visiting Chicago for the very first time. Since 2012, he has been teaching workshops in contact improvisation in Austria, France, Germany, Nigeria and Benin. He received his training from teachers like Adalisa Menghini, Jörg Hassmann, Nancy Stark Smith, Anzhelika Doni, Nita Little, Andrew Harwood, Frey Faust and in Butoh from Minako Seki, Yuko Kaseki, Imre Thormann, Yumiko Yoshioka, Natsu Nakajima, Masaki Iwana, Ken Mai et Yoshito Ohno. Recent collaborations involve Michael Schmacke (Fake Masters, Berlin), Lynda Ait Amer (Berlin) et Mex Schlüpfer at the Volksbühne Berlin and Illuminate Theatre (Lagos).