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Lead artists: Michiyasu Furutani, Yuka Negoro, Daniel Somerville

Participating artists (2023): Carolina Arandia, Nhung Dang, Minnie Milk, Michal Nagy, Anna Solianyk, Eva Urbanová

Participating artists (2024): Carolina Arandia, Kristyna Boháčová, Nhung Dang, Tereza Juráková, Markéta Kultová, Minnie Milk, Michal Nagy, Michaela Ondrašinová, Orkun Türkmen

Additional participating artists (2024): Anna Lopez Lozano, Irena Zwyrtek, Lucie Gaud, Marketa Fagan, Vladimir Benderski

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Daniel Somerville is an independent artist, performer and dramaturg and an academic researcher and lecturer at the University of Worcester, UK. Daniel began his study of butoh under Marie-Gabrielle Rotie during his training at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (BA Theatre Practice: Alternative Theatre and New Performance Practice) and Goldsmiths, University of London (MA Performance Making, distinction) and continued to train in butoh after completing his formal studies. His performance works combine butoh with a fascination for autobiography and operatic movement and have been performed at festivals throughout the UK, including Edinburgh Fringe. Daniel’s artistic interests converged in his doctoral research at University of Wolverhampton, where he analysed the movement of opera singers through the lens of Butoh embodiment. This process resulted in his work Admiring La Stupenda. Much of Daniel’s work is informed by a particular understanding of gender and queer theory. In 2021, he collaborated with Becka McFadden and Beautiful Confusion Collective on Black Dress which explored non-binary femme identity through autobiography and butoh-inspired movement.

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Yuka Negoro studied with third and fourth-generation Butoh dancers Kim Itoh and Setsuko Yamada in Japan and Marie-Gabrielle Rotie in London. She has been performing since 2000, presenting solo pieces or collaborating with other artists and musicians in performances for galleries, theatres and site-specific locations in Japan and Europe. Yuka was a member of Setsuko Yamada’s dance company BIWAKEI, which invented and investigated dance methods

through durational improvisation practices highly influenced by one of Butoh’s founders, Akira Kasai. After moving to the UK, Yuka studied visual art, which contributes to her current dance practice embracing attentive observation. In 2019, she completed an MFA in Creative Practice - Dance Professional Practice at Trinity Laban Conservatoire and Independent Dance/Siobhan Davies Dance. Yuka has taught classes as part of Butoh UK since 2014. Her practice is concerned with the perception of the body and its surroundings. It aims at encountering the unfamiliar in the familiar through the practice of attention, passivity, and sensitivity.

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Born in Osaka, Japan, Michiyasu Furutani is a choreographer, dancer, and performer whose work and expression grow from Butoh technique and practice. In the process of continual research, he has developed his vocabulary of movement to encompass in improvisation and a variety of modern and classical dance techniques forming necessity, possibility, and contingency. Furutani has collaborated frequently with theatre directors, filmmakers, architects, painters and musicians, aiming to broaden the communications between diverse art disciplines, and has performed widely throughout the world, always investigating new modes of expression and movement. He believes that improvisation is a crucial factor in discovering new spaces for mutual sharing and exchanging our experiences and knowledge of corporeal sense. He graduated from Nihon University, College of Art in Tokyo with a BA in Theatre and completed the MA in Solo/Dance/Authorship at HZT – Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum für Tanz in Berlin in Spring 2019.

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FELL, IN TURN foregrounds the principle of gravity as one of the central elements of butoh. Michiyasu Furutani and Lucia Bricco lead the audience through a series of experiments on how gravity intuitively influences our interactions and attention to our immediate environment. FELL, IN TURN can be observed as a chain of correlations between the action of scenic objects and the human body, whose movements reveals the inseparable relationship between the elements present.

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𓆱As part of the project Butoh in Contemporary Performance: Composition, visiting artist Michiyasu Furutani (JP/DE) will share his practice in a series of eight workshops held on Tuesday evenings and Wednesday mornings throughout September 2024.
𓆱These workshops will take place in conjunction with his two-month residency at MeetFactory, where he is researching food and movement as mediums of communication and collaboration, with a focus on communal dining and its impact on human connections and the environment. The research draws on Furutani’s butoh practice and is deeply rooted in his personal experiences, including as a dancer and one-time restaurant manager.
𓆱Workshop participants will discover the connection between physical movements and food ingredients through movement practice, examining the potential of food and movement as mediums for artistic expression, cultural exchange, and social interaction. Inspiration will be drawn from Japanese folklore traditions and East Asian and Western dining etiquette.

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Michiyasu Furutani’s composition project explored food and movement as mediums of communication and collaboration, with a focus on communal dining and its impact on human connections and the environment. The performance represents a culmination of the participants’ sensory exploration, resulting in an expression that uses vision, smell, and taste, thereby achieving a unity of body and sensation.

Created and performed by: Anna Lopez Lozano, Irena Zwyrtek, Lucie Gaud, Marketa Fagan, Michiyasu Furutani, Vladimir Benderski

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Composition Project: Performance (Michiyasu Furutani & coll.)

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photos: Paul Wade / the performance took place on 29 September 2024 at MeetFactory.

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In Admiring La Stupenda Daniel Somerville combines his Butoh-informed movement practice with his love for opera and his queer identity. Adopting the persona of an ‘opera queen’ – a gay man with an obsessive passion for opera and one diva in particular – Somerville traces his relationship to ‘La Stupenda’ (the late Australian coloratura soprano Dame Joan Sutherland) and how an admiration for this particular diva intersects and fuses with memories of his mother, now housebound by debilitating anxiety and dementia.

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ADMIRING LA STUPENDA (Daniel Somerville)

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The kind of Butoh practice that interests me opens space for intersection, paradox and juxtaposition. My process can be both playful and meditative, intense and throw-away. I can dwell in artificiality in the search for authentic emotion. Embody music, be moved by it – or create tension through opposition to it. I enjoy the gentle manipulation of time, stretching a single fleeting emotion over several minutes, examining each, sometimes contradictory, aspect of it. I like to lead participants through some Butoh techniques and invite them to expand in directions that allow the individual, their politics, passions and abilities to surface. Theatricality, visual performance and consideration of the audience experience are central to my work. Whatever inner journey we plot for the dancer, it is the transferring of emotion, thought and feeling to the audience that remains paramount. If we have something to say then we must communicate well. Participants will mine autobiography, can expect traditional Butoh-fu alongside queer dramaturgy, silence, stillness, opera and other genres of music; and they will be serving face, body and costume.

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We began our process considering memory, not specific memories, not the ‘what’ of memory but the ‘how’ of memory. How do memories (individual and collective) come upon us, emerging or erupting through our daily life – and how they pass too, like a footstep in wet sand. We move forward, grounded by the heel, while the imprints morph, erode, crumble and fade. And yet, there remains a trace, a spirit of memory.

Created and performed by: Kristyna Boháčová, Markéta Kultová, Minnie Milk, Orkun Türkmen

Technical collaboration: Filip Obermajer

Music selected by the ensemble and edited by Daniel Somerville

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Composition project: HEEL, performance photos

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Composition project: HEEL, performance photos

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photos: Becka McFadden & Paul Wade

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Resource 1: An A to G for transferring studio improvisation into performance.

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Resource 1: An A to G for transferring studio improvisation into performance.

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I find that when working towards a performance it is important to remember that Butoh is a theatrical form. It is intended to be seen by an audience. However, when developing material in studio we rightly allow ourselves freedom to create and excavate material without regard to who is watching. So in making the transition from studio to stage I have a few things that I like to consider at any given time in the performance.

1. Where is your Attention? Which part of the body? Which Butoh-fu? What part of the space? Which memory? This can change, oscillate, flow. I find a lack of attention will deaden the eyes and expression and will break the connection with the audience.

2. Which Butoh-fu is activated and in what part of the body? Are you immersed in one, in transition, or are several in action in different parts of the body?

3. What and where are you in the stage Composition? Are you working with light/shade/shadow? With negative space? With architecture? Use the skill of the fashion model, know what you are in the picture.

4. Think about Dress. By which I may mean costume in a physical sense – what is it doing/saying? How is it moving? What role is it playing in the composition? But, we may also use a kind of Butoh-fu costume – another layer, an imaginary costume that has weight and momentum that will have an effect on our movement and/or corporeal composition. With actual costume, never make unintentional adjustments – work with what is happening in the moment – or having rehearsed in the costume, place strategic adjustments in the choreography.

5. What Element are you moving through? Try not to think in terms of fast or slow movement, or even Laban effort actions (though it’s good to understand them) but rather allow an element (water, syrup, mud, clay, ice, wind etc) add tension and resistance to the body.

6. Is your Face in the dance? Facial expression using Butoh-fu specific to the face is so important in Butoh. There is no neutral face.

7. Are your eyes in the dance? Send your Gaze in an intentional way. I like to imagine beams of light coming from my eyes (and other parts of my body sometimes) so I can sculpt space, send the audience’s attention somewhere, face the audience literally head-on, scan the audience – by which I mean one can make eye contact by sending the gaze into another person’s eyes without ‘making eye contact’ per se. It’s more like looking through the person.

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Resource 2: Inspiration – Joan Sutherland

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Resource 2: Inspiration – Joan Sutherland

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Operatic movement fascinates me. The way in which opera singers use their bodies to embody the music, while also navigating the corporeal restrictions of singing in that disciplined manner. Restriction and flow. By far my favourite singer, Joan Sutherland, had an incredible influence on my movement practice – she seems never to stop even when she is still. She understands spatial composition, works with costume, and has the most expressive gestural vocabulary – limited but deployed to maximum effectiveness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itAGN8ew5HY

Joan Sutherland as Lucrezia Borgia is a masterclass in embodying music and in subtle movement that creates a sense of tension and non-stop flow. Also, a master class in how to work with costume.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGoBYXpYrdU

Joan Sutherland performing the ‘Mad Scene’ from Lucia di Lammermoor in a studio setting (without the crowd that would normally be on stage). Here she embodies the whole grandeur of the scene as well as the music. Watch with the sound OFF to see just how much corporeal control and expression is in action. Her fall at the end is the result of hours of rehearsal, she became known for her ability to fall.

Pinterest pages with Joan Sutherland costume drawings and performance photography that capture her sense of flow and understanding of corporeal composition.

https://uk.pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=joan%20sutherland&rs=typed

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Resource 3: Inspiration – Operatic movement

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Resource 3: Inspiration – Operatic movement

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Operatic movement fascinates me. The way in which opera singers use their bodies to embody the music, while also navigating the corporeal restrictions of singing in that disciplined manner. Restriction and flow. Watch with sound off or on.

Shirley Verrett as Lady Macbeth

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTcjHPzd4oc

A masterclass in singing, characterisation, use of costume and gesture and an acute sense of stage composition – on a huge scale.

Jessye Norman in Ariadne Auf Naxos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zcek54cj-6w

The three singers at the start, if watched with sound off, appear like shimmering statutes. When Jessye Norman begins, not only a great voice, but such considered movement and incredible facial expression – freeze frame at almost any point to find a new facial Butoh-fu.

Mirella Freni in La boheme

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTagFD_pkNo

She seems to be suspended in some kind of thick liquid.

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Resource 4: Drag and (so called) cross-dressing

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Resource 4: Drag and (so called) cross-dressing

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The art of drag and other performances in which (so-called) cross-dressing is employed are a huge inspiration to me. Drag has developed in recent years to expand beyond the idea that one binary sex dresses as the other binary sex in order for it to be thought of as drag. Drag is now about persona, exaggerated representations of gender, that may also transgress standard ideas of binary sex – and can be deployed by people of any gender.

I don’t consider myself to be cross-dressing when I wear a dress. As a non-binary person and self-identified ‘opera queen’ I feel very much at home and aligned with my gender in a big opera frock. Queer performance, Butoh and opera intersect in my practice – there is no division between high and low art. I discover correspondences between these forms and revel in what becomes tragi-camp – the deployment of camp while maintaining a sense of pathos.

I sometimes programme and host queer performance and perform in bar and club contexts. I sometimes perform in queer performance spaces where I present work that is operatic or butoh. I use drag and operatic movement and music in butoh inspired works and in my workshops. These three elements are always to varying degrees present in my way of thinking about performance.

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In an intimate encounter with the audience, dancer Yuka Negoro shares her practice informed by butoh through a pair of choreographed and improvised works. I and It investigates how I can split my body into two diverging entities, subject and object, simultaneously. The improvised performance Unfold enters the territory of the unknown, as I meet my body anew by attending and engaging with irrational emergent moments before cognition arrests perception.

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This piece is the outcome of a practice of embodying a dysfunctional and disobedient body to discover new states, movements and alternative aesthetics, freeing ourselves from a socialized, efficient body. The solo dance installations shown before the performance were devised by each performer inspired by a broken object that they had found.

Created and performed by: Carolina Arandia, Nhung Dang, Tereza Juráková, Michal Nagy, Michael Ondrašinová

Violin: Anna Štěpánová

Videographer: Adam Kratochvíl

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My making process will focus on the theme of incapability, starting with participants’ own observations and recordings (audio, video, writing) of living/non-living things (i.e., a broken umbrella, a handicapped dog), which relate to this theme. These observations will become the source material for solo performances, which will be developed in a process of exchange and sharing with others. Solo material will be combined with collective improvisation around the theme of incapability with specific scores (some based on Hijikata’s texts and some devised by myself). The resulting materials – solos, movements/expressions emerging from improvisation, visual recordings – will be woven into a performance score in dialogue with location (indoor/outdoor), music and silence.

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Composition project: TOE, performance photos

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Composition project: TOE, performance photos

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Resource 1: A task given to the performers

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Resource 1: A task given to the performers

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Resource 6: About my practice and notes for performers

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Resource 6: About my practice and notes for performers

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This project was conceived at a point when I had become very aware of how much of my performance-making practice is informed by my study of butoh in London with Marie-Gabrielle Rotie and interactions with a community of similarly inclined performers. In discussions with dance and theatre colleagues in Prague, I heard many echoes of my own experience and also a thirst to go farther, learn more, gain experience and build a community of practice around this work — not just for its own sake and not in search of an unreachable authenticity, but for its intersections with the other practices in which we were and are engaged.

Over the two years it has run, this project has shown what diverse performing arts works can emerge from a practice informed by butoh. Our guest lead artists Michiyasu Furutani, Yuka Negoro and Daniel Somerville have shared generously from their making and facilitating practices, presenting three radically different works of their own and leading local artists through masterclasses, workshops and making processes that, again, produced radically different work. Perhaps even more gratifying than the richness and variety of work produced is the community that has emerged around this project — connections made, collaborations seeded and friendships formed, between and among participating artists, lead artists and venues. I am excited to see what emerges in the years to come.

This padlet is intended as a digital archive of the project and a resource for artists interested in butoh-informed performance-making. Visitors can delve into the butoh practices of our lead artists and view documentation of their own performances and the work they devised with participating local artists. Each artist has also shared some personal resources and points of departure that can accompany you into the studio or site.

Happy browsing and if you enjoy this resource, please let us know — and pass it along!

Becka McFadden

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2023: Butoh in Contemporary Performance, open call text

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2023: Butoh in Contemporary Performance, open call text

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𓆱Venuše ve Švehlovce in collaboration with Studio ALTA announces a series of masterclasses and performances by three international artists whose work is informed by the practice of butoh. In this series of encounters, you’ll witness and experience different artists’ butoh practices, as they share their understanding of butoh and its role in their performance-making or choreographic practice. Each artist will also present the Czech premiere of a performance that draws on their Butoh practice.

𓆰These masterclasses are intended for artists based in the Czech Republic, who are interested in exploring Butoh. The masterclasses will also be open to paying participants, but this open call is for artists who wish to participate in the full series. A total of six artists will be selected and receive a stipend of 9000 CZK to support their participation. With the stipend, we want to make self-education in contemporary performing arts more accessible and create a secure space for learning and focused attention.

𓆸Prior Butoh training or experience is not required, nor is an advanced movement or dance practice. There is no expectation of any presentation or sharing of your own work, or work resulting from this series. The masterclasses will be held in English.

The project Butoh in Contemporary Performance is financed by the programme NPO no. 4/2022, Development of Competencies for CCS Workers: Projects of International Artistic and Professional Cooperation in the Czech Republic.

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2024: Butoh in Contemporary Performance: Composition, open call text

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2024: Butoh in Contemporary Performance: Composition, open call text

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𓆱Venuše ve Švehlovce in collaboration with Studio ALTA announces an open call for participants in a 10-day creation process led by two international artists whose work is informed by the practice of butoh. This postwar Japanese dance form, pioneered by Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, is often associated with a narrow aesthetic and cultural context, but contemporary performance contains many examples of artists working with butoh in very different ways. This project, which follows on from last year’s series of butoh masterclasses and performances, invites participants to go deeper and engage in performance-making processes led by Yuka Negoro and Daniel Somerville.

𓆰A maximum of five performers will work with each artist over 10 days. They will undertake an in-depth creative process that allows for learning from the butoh approach and practice of the facilitating artist and also provides space for sharing experience amongst the participants. The process will be concluded with a 20-minute group performance shared in two performances open to the public. During the process, participants will have the opportunity to observe the other group’s work and attend morning classes with both artists. All participants will also be invited to participate in a cycle of masterclasses led by Michiyasu Furutani in August/September 2024 (for the open call, it is not mandatory to commit or participate in these classes. They serve as an extension to the educational module).

𓆸This project is intended for artists based in the Czech Republic, who are interested in exploring butoh in the context of performance making. A total of nine artists will be selected and receive a stipend of 10,000 CZK to support their participation. With the stipend, we want to make self-education in contemporary performing arts more accessible and create a secure space for learning and focused attention.

Prior Butoh training or experience is not required, nor is an advanced movement or dance practice, but prior experience of performance making is needed. Participants should come dressed in comfortable clothes and prepared to move and explore.

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Curators: Becka McFadden, Petr Dlouhý

Partners: Venuše ve Švehlovce, Studio ALTA

Additional partners: Beautiful Confusion Collective, MeetFactory, Wild! Festival

Graphic design: Mariia Reshetova, Anna Kuřátková

Production: Zuzana Juklová, Filip Morstadt (Venuše ve Švehlovce), Kateřina Kubíková, Anna Kuřátková (Beautiful Confusion Collective)

Photography: Anežka Medová, Michaela Škvrňáková, Paul Wade

Videography: Aneta Baldovici, Adam Kratochvíl

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The project Butoh in Contemporary Performance (2023) is financed by the programme NPO no. 4/2022, Development of Competencies for CCS Workers: Projects of International Artistic and Professional Cooperation in the Czech Republic.

The project Butoh in Contemporary Performance: Composition (2024) is financed by the programme NPO no. 0315/2023, Development of Competencies: Projects of International Artistic and Professional Cooperation in the Czech Republic II.

Additional funding: The Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic