Boston Butoh Collective show with performances by Sara June and Melanie Hedlund, Ira Gorodetskaya, M. Kai and Vivi Filitovich, and Katya Popova and Julivic Marquez.

Mari Osanai’s workshops focus on Noguchi Taiso combined with the influences of her early training in Tai Chi, Western dance methods, traditional folk dance in Aomori, Japan (her birthplace), and the connection between one’s thoughts and sensation of weight. Osanai’s approach to movement research and exploration begins with a heightened awareness of gravity’s influence on the body and the body’s connection with the center of the earth. Exercises in the workshop train the body to embrace its weight and heighten its sensitivity to move from its most relaxed and receptive state. Starting with images, such as washing the body with water, air, sunlight, workshop participants will discover the body’s vital energies rooted in its inherent hydrodynamics. Movement and form result as participants ingest imagery inside their bodies and allow the changes to shift the body’s interior.

Workshop Time: 10 AM - 3 PM on Saturday, April 25th and Sunday, April 26th

Workshop Location: Arts Nexus at 665 Beacon Street Boston, MA., www.TheArtsNexus.com

Workshop Cost: $120 for two days, $60 for one day

To sign up for the workshop: email Ellen Godena: egodena@gmail.com

Yumiko Yoshioka in 100 Light Years of Solitude

Following Yumiko’s solo Before the Dawn, this is the second part of her trilogy “100 Flowers”  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.

“Yoshioka gives us no answers during this ritual of metamorphosis. She is a master shapeshifter offering to us an opportunity to live the questions.”

-Jacqueline West

Mari Osanai’s workshops focus on Noguchi Taiso combined with the influences of her early training in Tai Chi, Western dance methods, traditional folk dance in Aomori, Japan (her birthplace), and the connection between one’s thoughts and sensation of weight. Osanai’s approach to movement research and exploration begins with a heightened awareness of gravity’s influence on the body and the body’s connection with the center of the earth. Exercises in the workshop train the body to embrace its weight and heighten its sensitivity to move from its most relaxed and receptive state. Starting with images, such as washing the body with water, air, sunlight, workshop participants will discover the body’s vital energies rooted in its inherent hydrodynamics. Movement and form result as participants ingest imagery inside their bodies and allow the changes to shift the body’s interior.

Workshop Time: 10 AM - 3 PM on Saturday, April 25th and Sunday, April 26th

Workshop Location: Arts Nexus at 665 Beacon Street Boston, MA., www.TheArtsNexus.com

Workshop Cost: $120 for two days, $60 for one day

To sign up for the workshop: email Ellen Godena: egodena@gmail.com

Mari Osanai in Oblivion, Michael Sakamoto in Nikkei-Chan and Liz Roncka in Hut

Oblivion was born in 2018 in the atelier of theater company Watanabe Genshiro Shoten in Aomori, Japan with works of art by Shohei Yamashita. Where universe was also mother’s womb. “I wore a mask which made me nobody. I become free. A tightly closed mind is opened. From there something flows, warmly and coldly, into the body. The cells dissolve into flows, then vaporize and scatter.”

Nikkei-Chan is a semi-autobiographical, dance theater solo by Michael Sakamoto. Through butoh-based movement, video conversations with Japanese cultural expert Alex Kerr, and references to postwar cinema and music, Sakamoto navigates a transnational identity suspended between Japanese and American cultures. 

Liz Roncka will premiere her new solo, Hut, a structured improvisation which explores how we inhabit the layers that separate our inner self from the outer world from our physical shelters, to the protective layers of the body, to the protective layers of the psyche; how does movement through time and space alter these structures and how do these structures alter how we move through time and space.  This piece will feature a set created by Jennifer O'Donnell.  Jennifer is an organic gardener, designer, and death doula who creates vibrant urban landscapes and spaces that celebrate the natural environment and the processes within.

Belonging to a third generation of Butoh artists, Yumiko has developed a personal style of bodywork called Body Resonance, which integrates Butoh practice with features of Noguchi Taiso gymnastics and various other Asian training methods to help prepare the body to receive and transmit dance and inspirations. Body Resonance starts from the idea that the world, including our body and soul, consists of vibrational waves that create constant resonances like echoes. When we tune our body to that frequency, we receive images, feelings and sensations accordingly. For this to happen, we need first to shake off unnecessary tension. In effect, we make a white canvas of our body to paint new colour on it. I teach this as neutralization, encouraging a close-to-zero state, scouring off rust and polishing antenna to catch waves from profound layers of the body. The transformations and concentrations of dancing break up the eggshell of form. They melt down the armour of our ego, allowing resonant memories to emerge from our cells that are floating in the primal liquid of time.

Workshop Time: 10 AM - 3 PM on Thursday, April 23rd and Friday, April 24th

Workshop Location: Arts Nexus at 665 Beacon Street Boston, MA., www.TheArtsNexus.com

Workshop Cost: $120 for two days, $60 for one day

To sign up for the workshop: email Ellen Godena: egodena@gmail.com

Rosemary Candelario in Aqueous, Julie Becton Gillum in Butap, Alissa Cardone in (title TBD)

Rosemary Candelario performs aqueous which grapples with the extremes of water in the state of Texas, which eons ago was covered by ocean, and now includes large swaths of desert: drought and floods; dry plains swept by massive thunderstorms; hurricanes and dust storms; bordering the Gulf Coast but with no natural lakes in the entire state; water-rich regions and water-poor regions. Water here is alternately life-giving and destructive. Drawing on butoh’s ability to morph from one state to another, the dance embodies these contradictory aspects of water. Music by Sarah Ruth uses voice, electronic sounds, and acoustic instruments like the hammer dulcimer to project sonic extremes. The costume, constructed from water bottles and shower curtains, like the dancing body and music, transforms over the course of the piece, from a boat, to a mermaid’s jewels, to a fishing net, to a wall of rain. 

Julie Becton Gillum (Asheville, NC) performs her piece Butap . . . for my son John which explores both light and darkness found in maternal love.

Alissa Cardone (Boston, MA), offers a solo dance performance to a text by Sawako Nakayasu from her forthcoming book of poetry, “Settle Her.”

Belonging to a third generation of Butoh artists, Yumiko has developed a personal style of bodywork called Body Resonance, which integrates Butoh practice with features of Noguchi Taiso gymnastics and various other Asian training methods to help prepare the body to receive and transmit dance and inspirations. Body Resonance starts from the idea that the world, including our body and soul, consists of vibrational waves that create constant resonances like echoes. When we tune our body to that frequency, we receive images, feelings and sensations accordingly. For this to happen, we need first to shake off unnecessary tension. In effect, we make a white canvas of our body to paint new colour on it. I teach this as neutralization, encouraging a close-to-zero state, scouring off rust and polishing antenna to catch waves from profound layers of the body. The transformations and concentrations of dancing break up the eggshell of form. They melt down the armour of our ego, allowing resonant memories to emerge from our cells that are floating in the primal liquid of time.

Workshop Time: 10 AM - 3 PM on Thursday, April 23rd and Friday, April 24th

Workshop Location: Arts Nexus at 665 Beacon Street Boston, MA., www.TheArtsNexus.com

Workshop Cost: $120 for two days, $60 for one day

To sign up for the workshop: email Ellen Godena: egodena@gmail.com

A free symposium, Contemporary Social Issues in Butoh Performance, will kick off the festival and offer attendees a warm and interactive space to discuss compelling topics including how the roles of gender, race and culture intersect with contemporary Butoh practice. Featured panelists include:

Rosemary Candelario, PhD, Associate Professor of Dance, Texas Women's University and Author, Flowers Cracking Concrete and Editor, Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance

Michael Sakamoto, PhD, Associate Director of Programming/Asian Art and Culture for the Fine Art Center at UMass Amherst

Alissa Cardone, MA, MFA, Associate Professor of Dance, Boston Conservatory at Berklee