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Prepare Butoh Flowers, for May

gun©dadaware
Photo: dadware

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:

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SAVE THE DATE for Power Ouch!

February 14-17, 2019 at Links Hall

Power Ouch! is a four-night festival of body-based performance examining the ways violence shapes our lives and our experiences. The program features dance, installation, and performance art: work that looks like self-defense and like battle, that grapples with complex forces—resisting, yielding, mobilizing—to offer a solid blow against oppression.

  • Eryka Dellenbach in Make the Brutal Tender. Photoby Muyasaar Kurdi
  • Cat Mahari in The solo mixtape series Violent/Break: Vol II. Photos by Cat Mahari and Sabrina Chan
  • Marcela Torres in Agentic Mode. Photo by Jesse Meredith.
  • Holly Arsenault’s Punch Piece 11

Aurora Tabar and Carole McCurdy are curating Power Ouch! at Links Hall in Chicago. Participating artists include Holly Arsenault, Carly Broutman, Eryka Dellenbach withHanna Elliot and Nola Sporn Smith, Cat Mahari, Marcela Torres, and Rob Welcher with Jeff Hancock and Joseph Hutto. Read more about the artists and their work on their Facebook page.

Participating artists include Holly Arsenault, Carly Broutman, Eryka Dellenbach withHanna Elliot and Nola Sporn Smith, Cat Mahari, Marcela Torres, and Rob Welcher with Jeff Hancock and Joseph Hutto. Read more about the artists and their work on their Facebook page.

Consider making a donation to support Power Ouch! 100% of proceeds directly support the artists. Any donation, large or small, will help them get to their goal of $4,000. You can donate on their Facebook campaign.

FESTIVAL SCHEDULE
Thursday, February 14, 2019 @ 7 pm
Cat Mahari
Eryka Dellenbach, Hanna Elliot, and Nola Sporn Smith

Friday, February 15, 2019 @ 7 pm
Cat Mahari
Carly Broutman 
Eryka Dellenbach, Hanna Elliot, and Nola Sporn Smith

Saturday, February 16, 2019 @ 7 pm
Jeff Hancock, Joseph Hutto, and Rob Welcher
Marcela Torres

Sunday, February 17, 2019 @ 7pm
Jeff Hancock, Joseph Hutto, and Rob Welcher
Carly Broutman
Holly Arsenault


All performances at Links Hall
3111 N Western Ave
Chicago, IL 60618

$15 general admission/$12 students and seniors
Visit linkshall.org to buy tickets

Power Ouch! is made possible through support from Links Hall as part of their 40th Anniversary Season
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butoh teachers butoh workshops news ongoing classes

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.

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butoh workshops news ongoing classes performance events

Open Voice / Oscillations

photo by William Frederking

Weellllcoommmeeee to a 3 Part Workshop on Sound and VOICE. This class will feature exercises that will help you to freely use your voice and body to explore ~*vibration*~ and Microphones and sympathetic resonances.

OPEN VOICE: Micro Drone

NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY!

Sundays from 6-8p on Oct 28, Nov 4, and Nov 11.

$10 Suggested donation.

OPEN VOICE is a voice workshop focusing on vocal technique and improvisation, hosted by the performance trio LES CHANTEUSES DU RIEN. If the sound of your voice is always something you’ve wished to explore, come and join! Discover the possibilities and uniqueness of your voice, individually and with a group. Learn to deepen your listening skills. Get in touch with your inner child and create through playful improvisation. No previous experience necessary. Everyone is worthy of expression! Those that attend any of the workshops are welcome to open our set at Oscillations on November 16. Details will be discussed in all of the Open Voice workshops.

OSCILLATIONS: Divyamaan Sahoo / Les Chanteuses du Rien

November 16, 2018

Doors at 7:30PM. Music at 8:00PM

General $10 | Student/Members $8

Experimental Sound Studio

5925 N Ravenswood

Chicago, IL 60660

OSCILLATIONS presents concerts by artists selected from submissions received in response to an open call for proposals.

In the final evening of Oscillations performances, composer, musician, and puppeteer Divyamaan Sahoo will present his new work “Flatland” and Les Chanteuses du Rien (Elaine Lemieux, Hanna Brock, and Sara Zalek) will present an immersive improvisation utilizing the entire ESS building.

LES CHANTEUSES DU RIEN is Sara Zalek (movement), Elaine Lemieux (voice), and Hanna Brock (instrumentalist). We explore the dynamics of resonance in relation to space using classical scores, experimental opera, improvised sound, expanded cinema, and Butoh dance. Our gestures come from strong desire to communicate intimately, to seek an opening to our fears in an embrace. Ultimately, we want to surprise, disarm, and uplift the spirit, to continue weaving the long tail of our evolutionary story. We have been making in this collective for two years, in all sort of venues in Chicago, including Chicago Cultural Center, Edgar Miller Legacy Studio, Silent Funny, Ragdale Foundation and the Hungry Brain, and are looking to tour in 2018. We have been supported by Chicago Dancemakers Forum, Cheney Foundation, the City of Chicago, New England Foundation for the Arts, and the Ragdale Foundation.

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Formidable Dreams Premiere

21 October Sunday

Our first official showcase of Formidable Dreams, created and produced by collaboration between Eugene Sun Park and Sara Zalek in Dance-for-Camera Screenings in Claudia Cassidy Theater from 11am-1:30pm. Formidable Dreams screens at 11:55am and includes an all day installation in the G.A.R. Rotunda.

as part of: Elevate Chicago Dance
Chicago Cultural Center
ALL DAY – Free and open to the public

Formidable Dreams is a short film exploring isolation, dysphoria, and dreams of potential transformation. Through tableaux, operatic voice, and their curious interactions, these trickster heroines explore desire, longing, and the quest for the external elixir. In between conscious and subconscious places, these trickster characters enact both social and primal behavior, with an earnest desire to commune and elevate their status. Their vocalizations are hypnotic, reverent, absurd, and bizarre. Through images, movement, and sound, this film is an elusive narrative that creates a sense of bewilderment and curiosity.

Formidable Dreams takes place in urban, natural, and fantastical landscapes, using elements of Butoh, Opera, and improvisation as frameworks for exploration and development. Presentations and workshops evolve into interactive events featuring live performance with dancers, performers, musicians, and sculptural objects.

THANK YOU ❤
Many amazing artists from the Chicago community made this possible! Special thanks to Eugene Sun Park for the ideas and inspiration and keeping the candle burning for three years; performing still the cast of Heroes, Hanna Brock, Here Heather Marie, Elaine Lemieux, and Sara Goodman; editors Tracy Pitts and Lexi Midkiff; Gwyneth Anderson for Stop-motion photography;  extraordinary Camera Operators and handsome bachelors ETC Joe Lim, Brian Zahm,  Ed Bornstein, Sound Mixer: John Wong, Sound Engineer Specialist; and Event Photographers Rebecca Ciprus and Ji Yang
Event Photographer; Associate Producer/Production Manager/1st AD Gustavo Martin; Production Assistants Quinn Nicholson, Shir Avinadav, Angie Panganiban, Umnia Khan, George Ellzey, Katherine Johnson, Rebecca Ladida, and Molly Hewitt;  Mark Leja, Media Manager; Kevin Oliver-Krohn, Grip; Dylan Morris AC; Max Bryan, 2nd AC; plus final color corrections and trailer by Hannah Kim, PLUS Eryka Dellenbach for the documentation and film of Elevate performance 2017; and Chad Hagedorn for helping me realize the installation doors. 

The film portion of this project is supported by Chicago Dancemakers Forum, an Individual Artist Grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events, the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency through federal funds provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Cheney Foundation. Special thanks for development opportunities by Light Box, Detroit and locations that made it possible, including Silent Funny and the Chicago Cultural Center.

Directors statement: 
We, Eugene Sun Park and Sara Zalek, began to work together in 2012 and collaborated on some successful projects before beginning Formidable Dreams. With themes of identity and loss in mind—personal, racial, national, ethnic, gender—we have found many creative confluences. Our interests in displacement, myth, and the surreal; the search for our subconscious selves, our humanity, and dreams of potential transformation. We look to comparative mythology to reframe and recontextualize origin stories, to reshape current paradigms of cultural identity. The trickster hero characters in these films move in liminal and subconscious spaces. They rediscover their relationship to the world through their connection to architecture and each other. Through images, movement, and sound, these characters create a sense of bewilderment and curiosity as beings who continually seek to rediscover themselves. We consider the creative potential in all humans as powerful shapeshifters, mythmakers, and transformers of culture.

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Elastic Arts this Wednesday!

Peter Redgrave, Damon Locks & Wayne Montana

ELASTIC ARTS
3429 W Diversey Ave #208
WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 12 | 9:00 PM | $10

Peter Redgrave is just back from a summer residency on Lasqueti Island, re-emerging back to into this world at Elastic Arts on Wednesday. Remember his tricks from Battles? Lights and ladders and holes in the sidewalk?

Peter cut his performance teeth in the early 90’s neo no wave scene in Chicago. Playing in the band Mother Country Death Rattle and other performative music ventures, his projects combined the band format with visual and conceptual elements.

Since 2010, Redgrave has focused on staging movement. Using theatrical devices and sound, Redgrave builds a compelling world where witnesses are not sure whether to chuckle or weep. His latest piece, The Education of Icarus, is an offering to those who tend the ambitions of others.

He will open the show and then have a short break to reset the stage and then have a fifteen – twenty minute improvised set with The Eternals before they tear the roof off.
The Eternals:
Damon Locks is a Chicago based visual artist, educator, vocalist/musician, and deejay.

Wayne Montana is a member of The Eternals. He was also a member of Trenchmouth, a post-hardcore band from Chicago.

 

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Unknown Film Premiere

Saturday, September 8th
7:30pm -11pm

The Martin
2515 W North Ave
$10 suggested donation

From Directors Shannon Metelko && Mandy Work Wetzel “Unknown” is an experimental film that explores anxiety from inside the mind.​

Dancers embody racing thoughts, brain activity and tension that is a physical response to anxiety and unknowns. Using their physicality to portray the inner workings of an anxious mind, the dancers and aesthetic combine to juxtapose mental and body states portraying a central character’s experience.

The evening’s events include music, performance, film, and interactive stations exploring the light and dark of mental health, finding the silver linings, and what we do to feel better. A percentage of proceeds will be donated to local organization, ALSO-Chicago.

​We want to keep having conversations that result in less stigma and more self-love.

Performing ARTISTS:
Michelle Chorski
Les Chanteuses Du Rien
Alex Heller
Eve Rydberg
Shannon Metelko + Mandy Work Wetzel
Ayo VITI

Jennie Ellman and interactive art stations for attendees to express yourselves. ♥

​

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Asobi: Playing within Time

Friday August 24th @7pm
Saturday August 25th @3pm
MCA Chicago, 220 E Chicago Ave

Rika Lin (aka Fujima Yoshinojo) is a shin-nisei, a part of the postwar Japanese American diaspora, an interdisciplinary performing artist, a choreographer, and a grandmaster in Fujima-style Japanese classical dance, Nihon Buyoh. For her Lab project Asobi: Playing within Time, Yoshinojo trifles with the perception of time as an act of dancing. Searching for and testing the line connecting judgement to gender perception, Yoshinojo’s momentary, organic reaction reflects or responds using the traditional and creative musicians of the Reduction Ensemble, directed by Tatsu Aoki. Her choreography, which stems from traditional pedagogy, lulls viewers into believing what at first appears to be a traditional Japanese dance but is in fact a transgression, filled with subtle expressions of humor and protest.

What is Nihon Buyo?

The MCA presents SHareOUT!,  a new mini-festival of performance works that have been develop in a year of research supported by Chicago Dancemakers Forum.

More info and purchase tickets

Group Rate: Groups of 10 or more can get discounted tickets for only $10/person.

Tickets: $15 (Full price) | $10 (members) | $8 (student)

Tickets are on sale now, tickets can be purchased online or by contacting MCA Box Office at (312) 397-4010.

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butoh workshops news performance events

Conference of the Birds : Nejla Yatkin

Conference of the Birds by Nejla Yatkin

Performances:

September 1, 2, 8, 9, 15, and 16, 2018
Saturdays & Sundays 5-7pm

Where:
Beginning at Caracol Gathering Space (located south of McCormick Place Bird Sanctuary, by the lakefront at 2400 S. Lake Shore Dr.) 

Ending at La Ronda Parakata Gathering Space (south of the 31st St. Harbor, around 3300 S. Lake Shore Dr.)

Open the visceral door of your body, move within a flock. Join award-winning choreographer and master teacher Nejla Yatkin to explore the interaction between people, their movement, and the natural environment through this series of unique movement workshops on Saturday and Sunday afternoons in August. Participants will be guided through a process harnessing multiple practices including; Reiki, Feldenkrais, physical theater exercises, and contemporary dance. The conference will transform the way we experience ourselves through movement.

Workshop participants will perform in Conference Of The Birds, a series of six site-specific, interactive performances presented on Saturdays and Sundays in September in the Burnham Wildlife Corridor on Chicago’s lakefront. During each performance, workshop participants will guide an audience in an interactive and participatory movement practice inspired by bird flocking behavior with the goal of transforming audience self perceptions, their views of one another, and to move through an environment in new and unexpected ways.

My inspiration: “Everything in life moves. The human body is designed to engage with the environment through movement. Throughout a lifetime of choreographing, teaching, and dancing around the globe, I have learned how beneficial dance is to human development. Dance sharpens the senses, enhances social intelligence, challenges the body and mind and consequently reinvigorates our cognitive, physical and social development. In this workshop we will explore what moves people and how the collective energy inspires people to move.” –Nejla Yatkin

See samples of other work by Nejla Yatkin created in more than 30 countries around the world by clicking here or visiting https://www.youtube.com/user/aljen07/videos

About: Nejla Yatkin Award-winning and critically acclaimed choreographer and dancer Nejla Yatkin is a recent Drama Desk Award Nominee, Chita Rivera Nominee for Outstanding Choreography, 3Arts Awardee, and Princess Grace Choreography award fellow. Nejla hails from Germany, bringing a luminous and transcultural perspective to her creations. Her focus is regularly drawn to the role that memory and history serve in constructing identity, causing and resolving conflict, and the possibility of transforming cultural tensions into deep, authentic moments of human connection.

For more information please visit www.ny2dance.com

Conference Of The Birds by Nejla Y. Yatkin is presented as part of the Chicago Park District’s Night Out in the Parks series, supported by Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Arts programming in neighborhoods across the city advances the goals of the Chicago Park District and the Chicago Cultural Plan. Now in its sixth year, the 2018 Night Out in the Parks series will host over 1,000 cultural events and programs at more than 250 neighborhood parks throughout the city, making community parks a safe haven and hubs of activity. Projects will vary from traditional performances and concerts, to movies, peace rallies, community workshops, nature based programs, dance pieces, festivals, and more. The Chicago Park District has partnered with more than 100 arts and community organizations to expand and produce this successful initiative. Conference of the Birds is also supported, in part, by Contratiempo, The Jay Pritzker Foundation, and the McClelland Foundation.

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butoh teachers butoh workshops news ongoing classes

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