Tag Archives: butoh

CLOUD

Presentation | ErosThanatos | Tashi Iwaoka, Fazle Shairmahomed and Stefano Sgarbi

Sunday 30 April 2017 | 20:00
Check: Facebook event

Sexual obsession as a path to spiritual liberation.

In a society where many cultures strive to coexist, yet dominated by a few, many different sexualities are socially constrained. Where is the place for the two male dancers from different cultural backgrounds in this European context when it comes to spaces in between desire, obsession, sexuality and spirituality? Coloured with sounds controlling and directing this space, a metamorphosis which is ultimately about existentiality suggesting a certain kind of spiritual purification and blurring the tension between life and death as conceived in many recent Western ideologies.

A controversial vulgar sex and death scandal in Japan forms the inspiration for this performance. The story follows an erotic relationship of Sada Abe who eventually cuts off the penis and testicles of her lover Kichizo Ishida on May 18, 1936. Since then it has been interpreted by artists of different kinds.

This work has been developed independently in CLOUD/Danslab (The Hague) and OT301 (Amsterdam).

You are invited to the performance of this work-in-progress followed by a talk with the artists.

Doors open: 20.00
Start: 20:30
Entrance: Donation
There will be a bar hosted by CLOUD

About the artists 

Tashi Iwaoka
Tashi Iwaoka is a performance artist/mover. After his first Butoh experiences in 1997 with Kazuo Ohno and Kim Itoh in Japan, Iwaoka practiced Butoh based bodywork for over 10 years. Currently he is practicing Budo, Japanese martial arts, and working on finding the nucleus of human expression and connection, in relation to the movement skills he has learned. One of the central driving forces for this is the attempt to fuse his oriental roots and Western perspectives to form a more proper view on ‘being a human’ in this world. He wishes to disinter the universality in Eastern wisdom in order to help us understand what it is to be a human.

Fazle Shairmahomed
Fazle Shairmahomed is a dancer, performer, improviser, performance maker, graduated in anthropology. His work evolves in challenging understandings of inter-sensoriality, the relation between environment, performance, spectatorship, and society, and the ability to learn and train particularly in dance. His work is in general concerned with his political body in processes of de-colonization closely related to his background as a Surinamese-Hindustani born in the Netherlands. During his studies he started with Modern dance, which brought him to Butoh, Body Weather, contemporary whirling, and other dance practices.

Stefano Sgarbi
A composer, performer and sound therapist based in the Netherlands. His interests, starting from a general attraction to art and particularly music, are now more specifically towards electronic music, algorithmic composition, improvisation and sound therapy. He studied at the Institute of Sonology in The Hague where he has found himself in a rather prolific and inspiring artistic environment. Many of his works are performed in his local scene and some have being selected and played in festivals around the world.

Workshop

Butoh workshop | Natsu Nakajima | September 2016

Organized in collaboration with Butoh Channel Berlin

14 – 18 September | 10:00-14:00 | €180 early bird
Facebook

We are happy to announce the second European tour of Natsu Nakajima in Berlin, the Hague, and Barcelona. Natsu Nakajima (1943 Sakhalin, Japan) is one of the founding members of Butoh movement in Tokyo since the 1960s, and is one of its foremost pioneers abroad.

Workshop description
Combining Hijikata’s choreographic methods with the improvisation intelligence taught by Kazuo Ohno, as well as the long choreographic and performance expertise of Nakajima herself, this workshop will prepare you for sensitive improvisation work, choreographic aptitude, and performance integrity.  Natsu Nakajima will teach not only the physical techniques, but also the background of Butoh conceptions and ideas. Content:

  1. Physical Exercise 
    • General exercise
    • KATSUGEN activity (living vital force  activity) by Noguchi Method
    • body  &  vocalization
    • playing game
  2. Basic Butoh 
    • being nothing
    • walking
  3. Vocabulary (how to combine theatrical action & dancing movement)
    • rhythm (time) and space
  4. Various energy qualities
  5. Transformation
  6. Improvisation
  7. Butoh-fu  (Butoh Notation) from Hijikata’s work: how to use Butoh-fu and to combine with Hijikata’s method and Kazuo Ohno’s method.

About Natsu Nakajima
Natsu Nakajima (b. 1943 Sakhalin, Japan) has been one of the most prominent figures in Butoh dance since its foundation in Tokyo in the 1960s, and one of its foremost pioneers abroad. Training under both Hijikata Tatsumi and Kazuo Ohno, Nakajima went on to establish her own dance company, Muteki-sha, in 1969, with whom she has been performing and choreographing internationally since the early 1980s. Her highly acclaimed performance of ‘Niwa’ at LIFT ‘83 (London) marked the beginning of this international touring career, and led to performances at festivals such as FIND (Montreal), the Nancy Festival, and the Sydney Biennale. In addition to her performance and choreographic work, Nakajima has over thirty years of experience as a teacher, and has been one of the forerunners of dance for the disabled in Japan.

Ankoku Butoh (暗黒舞踏) – dance of darkness 
Hijikata Tatsumi, who passed away in 1986, is the originator of Ankoku Butoh; and Ohno Kazuo (1906-2010), an extraordinary and rare dancer, was his great collaborator. Hijikata was like Picasso; every season, he would change the style of his works like a chameleon. This partly explains why each of his disciples developed very different working styles. Natsu Nakajima was among the founding members of the Ankoku Butoh movement and belongs to the first generation.

Ankoku Butoh is a movement in the performing arts that was born riding on the wave of counter-culture in post-war Japan in 1950-1960s. Now in Europe, and some other countries, the term “Ankoku” has been dropped from “Ankoku Butoh”, and the term “Butoh” has become more closely associated with these countries. Losing “ankoku” has resulted in losing sight of the original ideology from when Ankoku Butoh was created and has given rise to many misunderstandings and misinterpretations.

Whatever you may call it, darkness, spirituality, or even something formless, something that cannot be put into words, or simply, the unconscious, the inexplicable, the destroyed and disappeared… …we are actually talking about something that cannot be seen. Something that Hijikata called “ankoku”. Hijikata liked to use the word “yami” (shadowy darkness). It gives the feeling of something that is full of contradiction and irrationality, somewhere like the “chaos of eternal beginning”… To deconstruct Ankoku Butoh with “language” is moving further and further away from the joy of early Ankoku Butoh’s integral quest for “the body as the scene of fulfilled life”.
(from the lecture of Natsu Nakajima)

 

Registration
Registration for 5-day Butoh workshop by Natsu Nakajima with an intensive training of 4 hours per day. The number of places is limited.

Early bird €180,- if registered before 14th of August
Late bird €200, if registered after 14th of August

Please register by mail to cloud.danslab@gmail.com
With Subject Title: Registration Butoh Workshop
Payment details will be provided and registration confirmed when payment received on CLOUD/Danslab bank account.

 

Workshop

Butoh Workshop| CHORE O’GRAFFITI | Yuko Kaseki

20 – 24 April
From 10:00 – 15:00 | 200
Facebook event >

After the success of the first Butoh workshop at CLOUD/Danslab,  lead by butoh master Natsu Nakajima, we organize the second butoh intensive week, now with 2nd generation butoh artist Yuko Kaseki.

About the workshop CHORE O’GRAFFITI
Dance is an odd job and graffiti is sprayed fast, erased and painted over and over in urban space. What is choreography? What is improvisation? What is life? Breaking the border of systems and accidents that feed each other to find their own way of creation. Take risk in the process for progress, to print on a new surface.

Participants are asked to bring their own theme for a performance, develop and demonstrate it. The intention of the workshop is to expose oneself to the possibilities and challenges of damage, and re-creation. Furthermore we will establish original movements through improvisation with image, gesture, space, and relationships and thus increase body awareness.

The physical training will be based on Noguchi gymnastics, elements of Tai-Chi, and Butoh methodology. We practice the whole body to make it permeable for the awakening and the deepening of our layers of sensitivity. We will attempt to explore how we associate the variations of our inner body in relation to the outer by listening honestly.

About Yuko Kaseki
Yuko Kaseki lives and works as a freelance dancer, choreographer and teacher in Berlin since 1995. She studied Butoh dance and Performing Art in HBK Braunschweig with Anzu Furukawa and danced in her company Dance Butter Tokio and Verwandlungsamt in 1989-2000.

Yuko Kaseki and Marc Ates founded the dance company cokaseki in 1995. She has been involved in various projects with musicians and visual artists.

Solo and ensemble performances, improvisations are performed throughout Europe, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Canada, Mexico, Uruguay, Argentina, Australia, Russia and the USA. These works are physical performance that incorporates Butoh, contemporary dance, object design, texts, and soundscapes. Yuko Kaseki performs and organizes improvisation series “AMMO-NITE GIG” (Vol.1 – 48 and on going) with international performers and musicians since 2004.

Collaboration with inkBoat (San Francisco) since 2001, CAVE (New York), Isak Immanuel/Tableau Stations(San Francisco), Theater Thikwa (Berlin), improvisation duo with Antonis Anissegos(Berlin) and others.

cargocollective.com/yukocokaseki

Registration and payment
Registration for 5-day Butoh workshop by Yuko Kaseki with an intensive training of 5 hours per day. The number of places is limited.

Early bird €200,- if registered before 18th of March
Late bird €220,- if registered after 18th of March
Drop-in registraton per day: €44,- (note that cancellation policy does not apply for drop-in)

Please register by mail to cloud.danslab@gmail.com
with Subject Title: Registration Butoh Workshop

Payment details will be provided and registration confirmed when payment received on CLOUD/Danslab bank account.

Cancellation policy
If you unfortunately have to cancel this workshop by any reasons, these are the conditions:

  • Before 18 March,   €20,- for administration expenses will be deducted
  • After 18 March, the cancellation has a fee of 30% of the total amount: early bird €60,- or late bird €66,-
  • After 1 April, the cancellation has a fee of 50% of the total amount: early bird €100,- or late bird €110,-

Previous Butoh workshops at CLOUD/Danslab

Natsu Nakajima from 18 – 21 August 2015