Week One
Fri 11/14
Performance: 8pm
María Belén Espinosa Peña,
Helen Thorsen
Joan Laage
Sat 11/15
Workshops:
10:30am-1:30pm
Natalia
2:30-5:30pm
Belén
Performance: 8pm
Natalia Cuéllar
Sheri Brown
Kaoru Okumura
Sun 11/16
Workshops:
10:30am-1:30pm
Belén
2:30-5:30pm
Natalia
Community Activities
location: Studio MA, 4336 University Way NE
ENTER FROM THE ALLEY east of University Way, BETWEEN NE 45TH ST and NE 43TH ST. .Studio Ma is a gray building with a black metal fence
Thu 11/13
Film Night & Kickoff Reception
7-9pm Free
with Belén and Natalia
Artist talk, film screening, and refreshments
Ticket
Tue 11/18
Butoh Cabaret
7:30pm
Sliding scale at the door
Curated by Mud Mouth Productions
Week Two
Thu 11/20
Workshop:
6-9pm
Atsushi Takenouchi
Fri 11/21
Performance: 8pm
Audiovisual/Butoh
directed by Hiroko Komiya & Chris. H. Lynn (Japan/Italy/USA)
Dhyana Garcia
Sat 11/22
Workshop:
11am-4pm
Atsushi Takenouchi
Performance: 8pm
Atsushi Takenouchi & Hiroko Komiya
Lin Lucas
Sun 11/23
Workshop:
12-6pm
Atsushi Takenouchi
Performance: 8pm
Alycia Scott Zollinger, Atsushi's workshop participants
María Belén Espinosa Peña (Chile)
PERFORMING: Las Últimas Horas de el Maestro
Espinosa Peña is an actress, performer of Butoh Dance-Theater, and Yoga teacher. María Belén holds a degree in Performing Arts and has cultivated a multidisciplinary career that bridges theater, dance, and circus. She trained in the Jacques Lecoq method at theInternational School of Gesture and Image La Mancha and explored Etienne Decroux’s Dramatic Corporeal Mime. She has studied with leading Butoh masters, including Atsushi Takenouchi, Minako Seki, Makiko Tominaga, Yumiko Yoshioka, Katsura Kan, Ken Mai, Tadashi Endo, KoMurobushi and Rhea Volij. María Belén is a member of Ruta de la Memoria, directed by Natalia Cuéllar, with performances in Chile, Peru, Mexico, USA, and Sweden and was production assistant for Santiago’s International Butoh Festival FIBUTOH. In 2016, under the artistic name Belén-Butoh, she founded her own company, Réquiem, dedicated to Dance-Theater. She has also appeared in numerous film and television productions in both leading and supportingroles.
Natalia Cuéllar/ Ruta de la Memoria (Chile)
PERFORMING: KI, the breath of time
Graduated in Theatrical Acting from Arcis University in 1998, she has trained in Butoh since 1993, mainly in Europe, with various masters such as Makiko Tominaga, Minako Seki, Itto Morita, and Katsura Kan. Founder of the Mendicantes Theater Company in 1997, she directed La Procesión, a production recognized for its physical and street-theater style. In 2007, together with Leonel Cornejo and Raimundo Estay, she founded the Ruta de la Memoria Company, which she currently directs, where she combines Butoh with Dance and Physical Theater. She organizes and directs the International Butoh Festival in Chile, FIBUTOH, an event that, across four editions, has brought together renowned artists, choreographers, and performers from around the world.
Atsushi Takenouchi (Japan/Italy)
PERFORMING: Hana 花
Atsushi Takenouchi began his Butoh journey in 1980 with the Hoppo-Butoh-ha company in Hokkaido. His final piece with the company, Takazashiki (1984), was created with the direct guidance of Butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata. In 1986, he created his own path: Jinen Butoh — as a universal expression of nature, earth, and ancient memories, embracing the rhythms of life itself. From 1996 to 1999, embarked on a three-year Jinen tour across Japan, performing over 600 site-specific improvisations rooted in natural landscapes and sacred spaces. Around this time, he learned the spirit of the universe of Kazuo Ohno and Yoshito Ohno. Since 2002 he has been based in Europe, working on solo Butoh and collaboration projects with dancers and actors, with giving workshops internationally. His presence extends into film, notably 'Ridden by Nature', an award-winning environmental art dance film by Kiah Keya. From 2015 to 2020, he directed an intensive Jinen Butoh school in Italy. Today, he devotes himself fully to transmitting Jinen Butoh through seasonal intensive workshops held both in nature and studio spaces — living his art as a continuous dialogue with life itself. In 2021, Compiling these experiences into a book, he published 'Atsushi Takenouchi Jinen Butoh' writing of his Butoh life, workshop contents and his Butoh performance works.
Hiroko Komiya (Japan/Italy)
DIRECTING: Frequency in Motion
Hiroko Komiya is a sound artist who transmutes the ephemeral - air, space, movement, bodily sensation, and memory - into boundless sonic expressions beyond conventional melody and rhythm. Since 1999, she has been the principal musical collaborator for Atsushi Takenouchi's JINEN Butoh and has provided live accompaniment for his performances and workshops worldwide. Her artistic reach extends beyond Butoh, engaging in multidisciplinary collaborations with filmmakers, sculptors, painters, poets, costume designers, and performers for exhibitions and installations. In 2022, she performed an 11-hour tribute performance to Félix Guattari (French psychoanalyst and philosopher) in Paris, alongside Ramuntcho Matta's art music collective and Atsushi Takenouchi. In 2021, she embarked on a new project with US film/sound artist Chris H. Lynn, creating audiovisual performances with Butoh dancers, performed in Vienna, Warsaw, Barcelona, Mexico City, Hong Kong, Athens and Kumano, Japan.
https://www.jinen-butoh.com/hiroko_profile_e.html
Chris H. Lynn (US)
Filmmaker, Sound artist
Chris H. Lynn is a filmmaker, sound artist from the United States. His digital images and Super 8 films explore the subtle rhythms of movement, light, and sound in urban and rural landscapes that vary from the Eastern shores of Maryland, U.S. to Nanjing, China. His work has been shown at the Librairie Avant-Garde, Nanjing, China, UNZALAB in Milan, Italy, American Film Institute (AFI) in Silver Spring, Md, Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinamericano Habana, Cuba, Goethe Institut, Washington D.C., The Anthology Film Archives, NYC, and Tanami theater in Japan, a variety of venues internationally. His work was featured in the book Cinema and the Audiovisual Imagination by Robert Robertson. He currently hosts the monthly radio program Beyond Encounters on Camp Radio. His sound works have been published on Impulsive Habitat, Verz Imprint, Green Field Recordings, Kandala Records, Plus Timbre and echOmusic and have appeared on radio programs worldwide. https://framingsounds.com/
Workshops Description
11/15, 11/16
Natalia Cuéllar/Ruta de la Memoria Butoh Workshop:
The Biographical Memory of the Body
We will work with autobiography through an introspective journey into our sensory and emotional memory, which will be expressed in the development of movement. Each session begins with psychophysical training that enhances body awareness, concentration, presence,
energy management, and movement precision, among other aspects. The training is based on exercises that imitate the postures and movements of animals and insects, as well as the repetition of specific sequences, with a focused approach on breathing and resistance, leading to an emotional state that introduces participants to Butoh. The second part of the workshop explores Butoh through exercises specific to the technique, including positions, states of suspension, energy shifts, and phrasing. Visualization is also used to induce a performative and emotional state.
11/15, 11/16
María Belén Espinosa Peña Butoh Workshop:
Astronomical Method
We will explore bodily movement based on real physical forces that exist both within and around our bodies, as well as inside the Earth and even within stars. We will work with natural forces such as gravity, centrifugal force, and radiative force, and interpret their effects on our bodies—such as the phenomenon of “spaghettification” that occurs near a supermassive black hole. This is a sensitive and profound training that connects dance with the forces that govern the universe.
11/20, 11/22, 11/23
Atsushi Takenouchi JINEN Butoh 3-day workshop:
Life of Flower
with live music by Hiroko Komiya
Participants are invited to join a festival performance on Sunday evening
You are the only flower in the world.
Giving birth to the flower, blossoming the flower.
Flower opens life.
Flower is a soft body revolution.
Flower is love.
To open to the universe with passing through darkness to lightness,
passing through life and death.
Flower always circulating life.
Flower continues opening.
A life of a flower draws the circle with the universe.
* Please bring all white or all black costumes if they want to be in Sunday performance
Performance
Friday 11/14
Joan Laage/Kogut Butoh
Milky Way
Music by Michael Shannon & David Stanford
Endless stars in the Milky Way, peeling away existence, longing for a peaceful future…
Helen Thorsen
Kintsugi
Recorded music by Noise Poet Nobody, Lube Fondue. Kintsugi is the art of taking broken pottery and transforming it into a new object.
María Belén Espinosa Peña
Las Últimas Horas de el Maestro
A moving tribute honoring Chilean maestro Jorge Peña Hen, Belén's grandfather and musical legacy.
Saturday 11/15
Kaoru Okumura
OBORO - Veiled in Mist
Art by Hiroko Nagatomo
Sound by Asako Tateichi (shinobue) & Kaoru Okumura
Sheri Brown
The Suit’s Last Breath: Liberation of Form, Solo draft 1
Research, sound and visual development support by Flower Goal Xvi
Natalia Cuéllar
KI, the breath of time
One-woman movement choreography that explores the transcendence of time and memory from a female perspective.
Friday 11/21
Dhyana Garcia
Pilgrimage of Pulse
“An ancient intimacy: listening with bones, with feet, with the heart itself.”
Hiroko Komiya (Director)
Frequency in Motion
An audiovisual performance with Butoh: Atsushi Takenouchi, Vanessa Skantze, Joan
Laage. Live sounds, field recordings and objects: Chris H.Lynn, Hiroko Komiya. Super8
& digital film: Chris H.Lynn.
Saturday 11/22
Lin Lucas
Blind At The Gates
This explores ecstasy, anxiety, and wonder in a movement meditation on impermanence and the awakening promise of grief.
Atsushi Takenouchi & Hiroko Komiya
Hana 花
Created & performed by Atsushi Takenouchi JINEN Butoh, Music by Hiroko Komiya
Sunday 11/23
Alycia Scott Zollinger
apotropaic portal
Homage to the vulva in all of its intelligence, magic, historical and cultural magnificence throughout the world and ages.
Performed by workshop participants
Life of Flower
Directed by Atsushi Takenouchi JINEN Butoh, Music by Hiroko Komiya
