New York Butoh Institute presents Women Defining Butoh A FREE Butoh Festival Virtual Series October 1-30, 2021

Live performances at Triskelion Arts

October 27-29 at 8pm, October 30 at 7pm

New York Butoh Institute presents a free virtual series highlighting women’s important contributions to butoh, October 1-30, 2021, at vimeo.com/vangeline. Women Defining Butoh will showcase recent works by two generations of women butoh pioneers. 

Virtual performances will live stream and will

also be available on-demand for a limited time. The calendar of festivities is available at vangeline.com/calendar-of-upcoming-events. The series will culminate with live performances at Triskelion Arts, October 27-29, 2021, at 8pm and October 30, 2021 at 7pm. Tickets for the in-person performances are $18/$22 and available at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/triskelion-arts-presents-vangeline-theaters-eternity-123-tickets-166080755009. 

 

Virtual Schedule of Events

October 1-3, 2021: Natsu Nakajima, Saga Kobayashi, Hiroko Tamano. Lifetime achievement awards. Natsu Nakajima in Ihaien, Saga Kobayashi in In Being Jealous of a Dog’s Veins, Hiroko Tamano in Dream Bodies. 

October 7-9, 2021: Zero with Yumiko Yoshioka and Minako Seki. 

October 14-16, 2021: Yuko Kaseki in Shoot Jeez My Gosh, Eugenia Vargas in Umbria.

October 19-24: Cristal Sabbagh in Sowing Asynchronicities; Joan Laage in Earth Tomes, DAIPANbutoh Collective in Corporate. 

October 25-30, 2021: Anzu Furuzawa in Four Dances, Vangeline Theater (live performances at Triskelion Arts). 

The series will showcase female pioneers Natsu Nakajima, Saga Kobayashi, Yumiko Yoshioka, Minako Seki, and Yuko Kaseki. Following butoh’s migration East to West, our series follows the spread of butoh in the US via Hiroko Tamano, who settled in San Francisco in 1980, and Joan Laage/Kogut Butoh, who first introduced butoh to Seattle in the ’90s. Women Defining Butoh celebrates the legacy of these butoh legends with performances by the all-female troupe DAIPANbutoh Collective (Seattle), Mexican dancer Eugenia Vargas, Chicago-based dancer Cristal Sabbagh, and a live performance by New York-based company Vangeline Theater at Triskelion Arts.

The festival will feature timeless butoh works; other pieces are more rooted in contemporary culture, as reflected in a haunting piece on gun violence and war by Yuko Kaseki (Shoot Jeez My Gosh); Commedia Futura’s retelling of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Zero); and DAIPANbutoh Collective’s playful commentary on corporate culture (Corporate). “Dancing a line between the everyday, the divine, the personal, and the political,” Cristal Sabbagh challenges definition in Sowing Asychronicities; and with Eternity 123, Vangeline traces the symbolic journey of women's emancipation across time.

To kick off this series, New York Butoh Institute is pleased to administer, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lifetime Achievement Awards to Natsu Nakajima, Saga Kobayashi and Hiroko Tamano.

 

“Butoh is alive and well today,” says Vangeline, curator of this series, “and it is largely due to the pioneering work of women since the ’60s. These women are still very active today and are vital contributors to butoh’s global success. Their legacy endures; with this series, we celebrate women’s achievements and hope to inspire the next generation of dance-makers.”

About Vangeline

Vangeline is a teacher, dancer, and choreographer specializing in the Japanese postwar avant-garde movement form butoh. She is the artistic director of the Vangeline Theater (New York), a dance company firmly rooted in the tradition of Japanese butoh and the New York Butoh Institute’s founder. She is a 2018 NYFA/NYSCA Artist Fellow in Choreography.

Vangeline’s work has been heralded in publications such as the New York Times (“captivating”), Los Angeles Times (“moves with the clockwork deliberation of a practiced Japanese Butoh artist”), and LA Weekly, to name a few. More recently, her solo Hijikata Mon Amour received critical acclaim in New York Butoh Institute Festival 2019 (“a triumphant experience for both performer and viewer”– Broadway World). 

With her all-female dance company, Vangeline’s socially conscious performances tie together butoh and activism. She is the founder of the 15-year running, award-winning program “Dream a Dream Project,” which brings butoh dance to incarcerated men and women at correctional facilities across New York State. Vangeline has taught and performed internationally in Japan, Finland, Chile, Hong Kong, the UK, Denmark, Germany, France, the United States, and Taiwan. She is the author of the book of non-fiction Butoh: Cradling Empty Space (2020). www.vangeline.com. 

 

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.