In this workshop, participants will dive into Butoh teachings and investigate the possibilities of their bodies in their natural form. They will be instructed to expand their range of movements to include the subtle body, the avant-garde body, the fading body, and the unleashed body.
ALL LEVELS, BODIES, ABILITIES ARE WELCOME
Wear comfy clothes during the workshop. Participants will investigate the possibilities of their bodies in their natural form, including floating, hanging, and various qualities of movement or stillness. Exercises from Noguchi Taiso water body practice will help to remove customary societal and cultural behaviors, guiding dancers toward a state of bodily emptiness. At this point, without the constraints of old habits, the unconscious body can freely respond to its sensations, forces, and emotions. Dancers will be instructed to expand their range of movements to include the subtle body, the avant-garde body, the fading body, and the unleashed body.
Cost of workshop:
36$ (we will ask for donation and tips from people to add to Julie's cost I know JULIE is WORTH MORE than 36$ but I am afraid of pricing people out and then not having a good attendance in this stupid economy. Julie lemme know if this makes you unhappy... )
$13 for the performance.
Julie's Venmo:
Venmo@Julia-Gillum
Contact:
Julie Becton Gillum, artistic director of the 14-year-running Asheville Butoh Festival, has been creating, performing, and teaching dance in the US, Europe, Asia, and Mexico for over 40 years. She has practiced butoh for 27 years. Gillum was awarded the 2008-09 North Carolina Choreography Fellowship and used the funds to travel to Japan to study Butoh. Since 2019 she has been active in India, Serbia, Georgia, Greece, Mexico, and the USA. Recent performances at the Amsterdam Butoh Festival (October 2023), Seattle Butoh Festival (November 2023), and NYU Abu Dhabi Art Museum ( February 2024) were well received. Her most influential mentors in butoh have been: Anzu Furukawa, Diego Piñon, Yoshito Ohno, Natsu Nakajima, and Seasaku. Noguchi Taiso has become equally important for Gillum whose studies with Mari Osanai and Emre Thormann have refined her practice. She has been guiding butoh for 25 years and Noguchi Taiso for 10 years.
Butoh History: Originating in post-WWII Japan, butoh is a potent and revolutionary dance form. Butoh uses the body brazenly as a battleground to attain personal, social, or political transformation. In its early forms, butoh embraced and referenced Western artistic movements: German Expressionism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Existentialism, and Fluxus, all of which pervaded the Tokyo underground and the avant-garde art scene at that time. The co-founders of butoh, Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno trained in German modern dance, which was integral to the development of German Expressionism. But, eventually, they took opposite approaches to their dance-making. Hijikata’s work became known as ankoku butoh (dance of utter darkness); he embraced the grotesque and the absurd, exploring themes of sacrifice, struggle, and death. Ohno’s butoh was playful, humorous, and filled with light and life. Today’s butoh is influenced by both Hijikata and Ohno and wrestles to balance those contrary approaches. Philosophically, butoh slips between the cracks of definition in order to reveal the fervent beauty of the unique human spirit.
*Photographs by Carlos Salazar