Boston Butoh and Performance Art Festival

The Boston Butoh and Performance Art Festival will be presented at the Boston Center for the Arts’ Plaza Theater from Thursday, April 24th through Sunday April 27th, 2025. The program is co-produced by Mobius and the Boston Center for the Arts. We are excited to debut the program for our second annual festival which includes a free film screening, 2 evenings and 1 matinee of performance and a butoh workshop. This builds on the success of our inaugural festival in 2019 in which we presented headlining artists Yuko Kaseki and Zack Fuller in collaboration with Emily Smith and Michael Evans at the Green Street Studios in Cambridge. We are proud to provide Boston audiences with the rare opportunity to dive deeply into these enigmatic avant-garde performance forms.

What is Butoh? What is Performance Art?

“The world’s dance started from standing, but mine started from not being able to stand,” Tatsumi Hijikata the founder of butoh, once said. His butoh showcased the leper, the diseased body; the “encounter with something in the body that has gone astray.”

Butoh first appeared in post-World War II Japan in 1959, under the collaboration of Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, "in the protective shadow of the 1950s and 1960s avant-garde". A key impetus of the art form was a reaction against the Japanese dance scene then, which Hijikata felt was overly based on imitating the West and following traditional styles like Noh. Thus, he sought to "turn away from the Western styles of dance, ballet and modern,” and to create a new aesthetic that embraced the "squat, earthbound physique... and the natural movements of the common folk". This desire found form in the early movement of "ankoku butō". The term means "dance of darkness". Rather than aspiring to an aesthetic ideal, the dance attempts to expose the joys and sorrows of life, exploring the most fundamental elements of physical and psychological existence. It crosses the boundaries between dance and theatre, creating a unique form of expression that engages, moves and intrigues.

From “Butoh: The Dance of Death and Disease” by William Andrews, Japan Times

About Mobius

Mobius (est. 1977) is a non-profit, artist-run organization whose mission is to generate, shape and test experimental art. Mobius is committed to structuring environments that foster projects incorporating a wide range of disciplines. This approach sets in motion situations where the artist’s impact can be seen locally, nationally and internationally. Constructing art initiatives outside accepted frameworks and encouraging animated discourse with the public are fundamental to Mobius. http://www.mobius.org

About the Boston Center for the Arts

Boston Center for the Arts is the nexus of the arts in Boston, fostering the development of contemporary visual and performing arts and convening artists and audiences to create, explore and celebrate all creative disciplines. An integral part of the cultural fabric of the city, BCA utilizes its historic campus in the vibrant South End to present world-class exhibitions and performances, provide affordable work space, engage cultural consumers throughout the region, and nurture artists with the resources to take risks and develop new art works.

The Boston Center for the Arts’ Plaza Theater is located at 539 Tremont Street in Boston’s historic South End neightborhood.

The Boston Butoh and Performance Art Festival is made possible through generous private funding and corporate matching programs. We would like to thank Max Lord, Nathan Andary, and anonymous donors for helping us to make this festival possible. All proceeds from the festival will be utilized to pay the artists and technical staff whose hard work and ingenuity have made the festival a success.