FESTIVAL 2005: PERFORMANCES

Azumaru   CAVEnsemble   Masaki Iwana   Akira Kasai   Yuko Kaseki   Kan Katsura  
Shinichi MOMO Koga   Ko Murobushi   Daisuke Yoshimoto   Yumiko Yoshioka  



AT JAPAN SOCIETY (333 East 47th Street)

Ko Murobushi: Handsome Blue Sky (U.S. Premiere)
October 6 - 8 (Thursday - Saturday) at 7:30pm
Presented by Japan Society in conjunction with the 2005 New York Butoh Festival

st Ko Murobushi returns to the Japan Society to present this new full-length work. Performed by Murobushi and his company of three male dancers, Handsome Blue Sky investigates the essence of butoh and the philosophy of its founder, Tatsumi Hijikata. Based on one of Hijikata's essays, Murobushi uses the metaphor of the sky to release the freedom of the dancers' bodies through his signature blend of violence and gorgeous stage poetry.

Ko Murobushi trained and performed with butoh's creator Tatsumi Hijikata and was a founding member of Dairakudakan, the largest and oldest butoh company. His influential group Ariadone introduced Europe to butoh in 1978. Based in Japan, he tours internationally throughout Europe and South America.

"Murobushi's butoh is a theatre of revulsion, convulsion or repulsion. The body is…full of violent energy, soft, anti-human and cannibal."
Jean Baudrillard


AT CAVE (58 Grand Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn)

Festival Opening Celebration
CAVEnsemble with Special Guests: Azumaru, Yuko Kaseki, Shinichi MOMO Koga & New York Soundpainting Orchestra
October 13 (Thursday) from 8:00 - 11:00pm

CAVEnsemble is joined by a variety of special guests and local butoh dancers to collectively create a series of performance installations spread throughout CAVE's multiple rooms. These tableaus are a reflection of the ambivalence of the conscious and the unconscious - creating together a ceremony that rediscovers the pulse of our existence. After the performances, stay for music, wine and food and help us launch our three-week festival at the Festival Opening Celebration.

CAVEnsemble, led by Artistic Directors Ximena Garnica and Juan Merchan, is a dance-theater group in residency at CAVE. The group works in collaboration with artists from different disciplines to create site-specific dance installations and theater productions with a strong butoh influence.

Azumaru is a rising star of the butoh dance world. In 1999 he became a member of the acclaimed butoh group Dairakudakan and began training with its legendary director Akaji Marô.

Yuko Kaseki started the butoh group Cokaseki with director Marc Ates. They have performed their work throughout Europe and the U.S. Based in Berlin since 1999, Cokaseki has developed its own rich choreographic vocabulary that is rhythmic and elegant and blends butoh with modern dance techniques.

Shinichi MOMO Koga, an actor and butoh dancer, has presented solo and ensemble work internationally since 1988. Founder of the butoh group inkBoat in San Francisco, his theatrical, multi-media pieces are heavily influenced by his various trainings in butoh dance, Tadashi Suzuki's theater method, Ruth Zaporah's Action Theater, filmmaking and photography.


New York Soundpainting Orchestra (NYSO) was founded in 2005 by Walter Thompson. The NYSO stands at the vanguard of live performance by exploring composition through Soundpainting, the universal sign language developed by Thompson for creating live composition from structured improvisation.

AT THEATER FOR THE NEW CITY (155 First Avenue between 9th and 10th Streets)

Daisuke Yoshimoto: Eros and Thanatos (U.S. Premiere)
October 19 & 20 (Wednesday & Thursday) at 8:00pm
Double bill with Yumiko Yoshioka

Renowned solo dancer Daisuke Yoshimoto presents a haunting and powerful piece that premiered in 2004 at the Grotowski Center in Poland. In this deeply meditative piece about sex and death, Yoshimoto takes us on an evolutionary journey. Using the metaphor of the naked body as landscape in flux, he transforms himself and demonstrates the tranquility of life.

Daisuke Yoshimoto has collaborated with the greatest artists of butoh, such as Kazuo Ohno, Hisayo Iwaki and Yukihiko Sakai. Primarily a solo artist, over the past twenty years he has carved out his own unique and theatrical style. Based in Tokyo, he tours and teaches workshops internationally.

Yumiko Yoshioka: Before the Dawn (World Premiere)
October 19 & 20 (Wednesday & Thursday) at 8:00pm
Double bill with Daisuke Yoshimoto

Yumiko Yoshioka's work challenges the traditional conventions of butoh by blending dance, visual art and music. Her new piece is a joyful dance of metamorphosis, where darkness melts into brightness. Through the transformation of her body, Yoshioka illuminates the hidden secrets of the body - the dark and beautiful memories that forever haunt us.

Yumiko Yoshioka was a founding member of the first all-female butoh group Ariadone and has been instrumental in bringing butoh to Europe: first with Ariadone in Paris in 1978 and then in Germany with her group Theatre Danse Grotesque (1988-1994). She has toured and taught extensively in Japan, Europe, Russia, Israel and both North and South America and presently is based in eastern Germany where she runs the group TEN PEN Chii, with visual artist Joachim Manger and musician Zam Johnson.

"Yoshioka was what every dancer dreams of becoming: a perfectly tuned expressive form, capable of making even the empty space between limbs or fingers thrum with life."
Dance Magazine

Kan Katsura: Time Machine (World Premiere)
October 21 (Friday) at 7:00pm
Double bill with Azumaru and Jack Wright

Katsura describes this new work as a walk in a "benighted forest" where nature teaches him how to live in a world driven by time and speed. This piece, which fuses highly physical and frenetic moments with poetic and dream-like choreography, is one of Kan's most intense and complex works.

Kan Katsura has been based in Kyoto since 1979. His butoh is unique in that it is truly multi-cultural. He has dedicated his career to exploring the nature of contemporary Asian art by creating collaborations with other visual and performing artists throughout Indonesia, Singapore, Bangkok and Japan. In addition to his extensive performance career in Asia, he has taught and performed in Israel, Egypt, Switzerland, France and Australia.

"Kan's work is full of humor and surprise that leaves one awestruck at its menacing conclusion…thrillingly bizarre."
Boston Sunday Herald

Azumaru with musician Jack Wright
October 21 (Friday) at 7:00pm
Double bill with Kan Katsura

Emerging butoh dancer, Azumaru, improvises with musician Jack Wright.

Azumaru is a rising star of the butoh dance world. In 1999 he became a member of the acclaimed butoh group Dairakudakan and began training with its legendary director Akaji Marô.

Jack Wright, a musical explorer for the past twenty years, plays alto, tenor, and soprano saxes, contra-alto clarinet, and piano, in every possible direction, but rarely what is recognizable.

"In the rarefied, underground world of experimental free improvisation, saxophonist Jack Wright is king." The Washington Post

Masaki Iwana: Beast of Grass (World Premiere)
October 21 (Friday) at 9:30pm, October 22 (Saturday) at 5:00pm
Double bill with Cokaseki

Masaki Iwana has blazed his own trail in butoh. His early performances were marked by his radical and rigorous approach of complete stillness and nakedness. This new piece is a testament to his evolving aesthetic. Concerning his work, Iwana says, "When I was young, I wanted to become something strong. Later I wanted to be something gentle-fragile and fleeting, perhaps. But now, I only want to be as I am. What else could I want to be?"

Masaki Iwana began his dance career in 1975 outside the “butoh genealogy.” Until 1982 he presented 150 experimental performances in which he stood straight, completely naked and perfectly still. Since then, Iwana has presented his performances and workshops in 35 countries and has created works which are built on his sharpened aesthetic. Iwana runs an institute for the research of butoh, La Maison du Butoh Blanc.

"When Iwana suddenly strips himself bare, he becomes a pure human figure, an act that moved me with some very real yet inexplicable feelings."
New York Dance Fax

Cokaseki: Tooboe (Howl) (U.S. Premiere)
Choreography by Yuko Kaseki and Marc Ates
October 21 (Friday) at 9:30pm, October 22 (Saturday) at 5:00pm
Double bill with Masaki Iwana

This solo dance by Yuko Kaseki is based on a story by Japanese author Hyakken Uchida (1889-1971). In Tooboe (Howl), elements of fantasy seep into the heroine's ordinary day-to-day existence. This dance explores the character's journey from reality to surreal fantasy and juxtaposes moments of fear with absurd humour.

Cokaseki is led by Yuko Kaseki (choreographer/dancer) and Marc Ates (choreographer/director), who have performed their work throughout Europe and the U.S. Based in Berlin since 1999, the company has developed its own rich choreographic vocabulary that is rhythmic and elegant and blends butoh with modern dance techniques.

Yuko Kaseki has lived and worked as a freelance dancer, choreographer and teacher in Berlin since 1995. From 1989 to 2001, she was the primary dancer in Anzu Furukawa's seminal butoh group Dance Butter Tokyo. Kaseki has developed her own rich choreographic vocabulary that is rhythmic and elegant and blends butoh with modern dance techniques. She has performed her solo and ensemble work throughout Europe and the U.S., and since 2001 has been collaborating with San Francisco-based butoh dancer, Shinichi Momo Koga and his inkBoat company.

"Yuko Kaseki is the Ginger Rogers of Butoh. Time speeds up and then slows, and childlike play and sexual prowess whirl around with humor either wry or raucous."
San Francisco Bay Guardian

Akira Kasai: Flowers (World Premiere)
October 22 (Saturday) at 8:00pm, October 23 (Sunday) at 2:30pm
Saturday double bill with the New York Soundpainting Orchestra
Sunday double bill with Kan Katsura

Akira Kasai is famous for his intensely athletic dances that defy convention and blend butoh with traditional Japanese dance, classical ballet, break-dancing and yoga. In this highly personal solo performance piece that shifts radically between restraint and complete abandon, Kasai presents a universe where chaos, death and love are "like flowers blooming all over the sky."

Akira Kasai has been called the "Nijinsky of butoh" because of the stunning energy and concentration of his wild improvisational dances. In the 1960s he studied with Kazuo Ohno, one of the founders of butoh, and in 1971 started his own butoh company Tenshi-kan. He moved to Germany in 1979 and trained there for six years in eurhythmy and anthroposophy. Since his return to Japan he has cultivated his own highly idiosyncratic style of dance, pushing the envelope of butoh by mixing in elements as diverse as kabuki and hip-hop.

"Part Marcel Marceau, part Mick Jagger, Kasai would leap into the air but start another step before landing…his low groans and high sighs all seemed part of a kind of existential fun."
Dance Magazine


Evan Mazunik conducts the New York Soundpainting Orchestra (NYSO)
October 22 (Saturday) at 8:00pm
Double bill with Akira Kasai

The New York Soundpainting Orchestra (NYSO) was founded in 2005 by Walter Thompson. The NYSO stands at the vanguard of live performance by exploring composition through Soundpainting, the universal sign language developed by Thompson for creating live composition from structured improvisation. The NYSO has performed at Galapagos, ABC No Rio, CAVE and the Tank.

"There is no end to the variations and combinations possible…Soundpainting: elating!"
Ingvar Loco Nordin

Kan Katsura
October 23 (Sunday) at 2:30pm
Double bill with Akira Kasai

For a description of Katsura's work, see details for his October 21st performance.

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