The following description comes from the event organizer.

The 2022 Salish Sea International Butoh PERFORMANCE GALA


A ONE-NIGHT ONLY SHOW featuring stage performances by:
Katsura Kan from KYOTO, JAPAN
Yuko Kaseki from BERLIN, GERMANY
Jacquelyn Marie Shannon from BROOKLYN, NY


Saturday, August 13
7:00pm -- Doors open || 7:30pm -- SHOWTIME

USO Hall at Fort Worden State Park
25 Eisenhower Way, Port Townsend, WA 98368

Join us for a very special theatrical event celebrating the unique artform of Japanese Butoh.  This is a production of the second-ever Salish Sea Butoh Festival in Port Townsend, Washington.  It highlights master artists of the 1st generation of Butoh from Japan along with 2nd and 3rd generation artists from all over the world performing on the same stage.  All ticket purchases include admission to a post-show reception with complimentary refreshments and a chance to meet and talk to the artists.

ARTIST BIO'S:

KATSURA KAN is a Butoh dancer and choreographer from Kyoto, Japan and among the ranks of Japan's senior generation of Butoh.  In 1979, Kan began his career as a dancer with the seminal Butoh troupe Byakkosha, known for their theatrically explosive, provocative, and highly charged performance style.  In 1985, Kan trained and worked with Butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata during Hijikata's final year as a living artist.  Kan left Byakkosha in 1981 to Launch and direct an international dance troupe called Katsura Kan & Saltimbanques.  His own multinational Butoh company, The Saltimbanques, has featured dancers from North America, Europe, Israel, Australia, and Thailand as well as Japan.  For the last ten years, Kan has organized numerous academic Butoh conferences in Kyoto and all over the world for the next generation of Butoh.  Katsura Kan describes Butoh to be "based on the body as a costume and a Landscape which has the potential to recover, activate and revitalize humanity and the community."

YUKO KASEKI is a Butoh dancer, performer, improviser, choreographer, and teacher born in Chiba, Japan and based in Berlin, Germany since 1995.  She studied performing arts at the Braunschweig University of Fine Arts and trained with Anzu Furukawa of the legendary Japanese Butoh company DAIRAKUDAKAN.  For over a decade, Yuko studied Butoh with Furukawa and danced in two of her performance companies: Dance Butter Tokio and Verwandlungsamt.  Yuko moved to Berlin in 1995 and founded the company Cokaseki, which is still active to this day.  Her strong interest in breaking the border of physical existence leads to projects with mixed ability artists and performers. Yuko's artwork incorporates the spirit of Butoh and also borrows from avant-garde Performance Art using physical objects, literary texts and experimental writings, and Live soundscapes.

Yuko has performed in Europe, the USA, Canada, Mexico, Uruguay, Argentina, Australia, Taiwan, Korea and Japan. She has collaborated with numerous international artists and companies, including inkBoat (San Francisco), CAVE (New York City), Antonis Anissegos (Berlin), Isak Immanuel/Tableau Stations (San Francisco) and Theater Thikwa (Berlin).

JACQUELYN MARIE SHANNON is a performance and ritual artist, choreographer and teacher heavily influenced by Butoh, avant-garde theater, spiritualism, and the nostalgic mythos and mysticism of the south.  Since her introduction to Butoh in 2006, Jacquelyn is thankful to have studied under a variety of master teachers, with particular gratitude to Anastazia Louise Aranaga and Diego Piñón.  Jacquelyn holds a Master's Degree from Indiana University where she studied Butoh and other expressive modalities through theories of effect, performance, and visual and embodied poetics.  Her current projects explore spaces of exchange between haunting, corporeality, magic, and materiality through living installation, ritual, and multi-media performance with an emphasis on the affective, precarious, poetic body.  Jacquelyn is currently a Ph.D. student in Theatre and Performance at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center.  Her research focuses on the hidden, unseen, or unspeakable, investigating instances in theatre and performance in which the evocation of unseen or supernatural forces do transformative social, cultural, and political work.  She is especially interested in ghosts and haunting, spiritualism and seance, ceremonial magic and witchcraft, shamanic ritual, and neo-pagan practices and performance.  Jacquelyn continues to research Butoh as a piece of poetic equipment for manifesting radical possibility, and for personal/social transformation.


ABOUT BUTOH:
Butoh is an avant-garde dance movement that originated in Tokyo, Japan shortly after WWII.  It is characterized by physical movements that tend towards the earth and the subconscious.  Butoh, which is influenced by and incorporates elements of Surrealism, Dada, French Existentialism, German Expressionism, Japanese theatre, and eastern spiritual thought, was developed in the late 1950s and 1960s through experimental collaborations between its founders Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno.  Their work established Butoh as disciplined and rigorous, yet spontaneous and idiosyncratic, intellectual and experimental, yet grounded in the human body.  Instead of aspiring to an aesthetic ideal, Butoh reveals the primordial human being and the inner world.  It implies total presence where dance is an expression of being in the world as well as containing the world within oneself.  It grows from themes such as dreams, ghosts, androgyny, nature, solitude, and the natural cycles of life and death.