Author: Constance Humphries

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Asheville Butoh Collective Fundraiser

Asheville Butoh Collective Fundraiser

Please join us for sushi, sake and live performances by Asheville Butoh Collective
at The BeBe Theatre, February 24 from 5-7pm to support the 13th Asheville Butoh Festival. $10 at the door.

The Asheville Butoh Collective and ACDT will present ABC’s 13th Asheville Butoh Festival, featuring two weekends of butoh performances and workshops with Mari Osanai and Yuko Kaseki in April/May, 2019. Asheville Butoh Collective’s Jenni Cockrell and Constance Humphries will premiere evening-length shows as well. Please support the creation and production of this work at our 2019 Spring Fundraiser.

We look forward to seeing you on February 24th, 5-7pm at The BeBe Theatreto share the excitement. If you are unable to attend the event, please consider making a donation online. Donations are tax deductible. All amounts are helpful to produce the festival.

For more information:
Asheville Butoh Collective
Facebook Event

Directions:
BeBe Theatre
20 Commerce St.
Asheville, NC 28801

Fundraiser Performances


Jenni Cockrell/strange daughters butoh will be performing an excerpt from her exploration of women in Shakespeare.
—
Jenni Cockrell of strange daughters butoh is a dancer, choreographer and teacher of butoh and modern dance. She has created and performed her own work in addition to that of Asheville Contemporary Dance Theatre, Moving Women, Legacy Butoh and Anemone Dance Theater, and has regularly performed in the Asheville Fringe Arts Festival. She received her M.A. in Dance and Women’s Studies from UNC Greensboro in 2002. (strangedaughtersbutoh.com)


Julie Gillum presents a work based on the Dogon concept of how matter forms. Point, circle, mound, cluster and spiral develop and mutate. Her RH negative blood is an example of this metamorphoses. (ashevillebutoh.com/legacy-butoh)


(Photo by Caren Harris)

Constance Humphries presents an excerpt of a work in progress, The Beautiful Us, which addresses issues of the body, love and trust through the lens of liminality.
—
Constance Humphries has been making, performing and teaching live performance internationally since 1987. Her creative practice is based on investigations via butoh dance. She holds degrees from UNC Chapel Hill and UNC Asheville. Recent projects include the Just Gather Film Festival, Edinburgh, UK , Help! at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle, UK and a residency at Experimental Studios, Newcastle, UK.  (constancehumphries.com)

13th Asheville Butoh Festival Guest Artists


Yuko Kaseki is director, choreographer, Butoh dancer, performance artist, improviser and teacher, based in Berlin. She teaches and performs in solo and ensemble pieces and improvisations through out 26 countries. These works are poetic and vivid images that incorporate the spirit of Butoh, performance and live art. Her performance aims to reflect the outsider’s existence. Various International collaborations include inkBoat (SF), Tableau Stations (SF), CAVE (NY), Poema Theatre (Moscow), Salad Theater (Seoul) and more. She is also a key collaborator with mixed ability artists including Theater Thikwa (Berlin).
www.cokaseki.com


Dancer, choreographer, teacher Mari Osanai has performed and taught in Japan, Canada, USA, Greece and Germany. Her workshops focus on Noguchi Taiso combined with the influences of her early training in Tai Chi, western dance methods, traditional folk dance in Aomori, Japan (her birthplace), and the connection between one’s thoughts and sensation of weight. Osanai’s approach to movement research and exploration begins with a heightened awareness of gravity’s influence on the body and the body’s connection with the center of the earth.

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Butoh @ the Asheville Fringe Festival

Butoh @ the Asheville Fringe Festival

Don’t miss these butoh performances and a workshop at this year’s Asheville Fringe Festival.

Double Feature: nothing and The Beautiful Us 
January 25th @ 7pm and January 27 @4pm
Static Age Records, 110 N. Lexington Avenue, Asheville, NC 28801
More Information
Get Tickets


nothing
Jenni Cockrell/strange daughters butoh
Jenni Cockrell’s unconventional reframing of the women of Shakespeare continues with a new Butoh solo, nothing, delving into the daughters of King Lear. Turning the story inside out, this experimental dance piece inquires about love, loyalty, forgiveness and sacrifice.
—
Jenni Cockrell of strange daughters butoh is a dancer, choreographer and teacher of butoh and modern dance. She has created and performed her own work in addition to that of Asheville Contemporary Dance Theatre, Moving Women, Legacy Butoh and Anemone Dance Theater, and has regularly performed in the Asheville Fringe Arts Festival. She received her M.A. in Dance and Women’s Studies from UNC Greensboro in 2002. (strangedaughtersbutoh.com)


The Beautiful Us
Constance Humphries presents an excerpt of a work in progress, The Beautiful Us, which premieres at the 13th Asheville Butoh Festival. The piece addresses issues of the body, love and trust through the lens of liminality.
—
Constance Humphries has been making, performing and teaching live performance internationally since 1987. Her creative practice is based on investigations via butoh dance. She holds degrees from UNC Chapel Hill and UNC Asheville. Recent projects include the Just Gather Film Festival, Edinburgh, UK , Help! at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle, UK and a residency at Experimental Studios, Newcastle, UK.  (constancehumphries.com)


Twisted From Constantly Watching Doves
New dance/butoh by New York based dancer/choreographers Zack Fuller and Emily Smith, two amorphous and shape shifting entities on a cryptic journey through glimpses of fractured fairy tales and twisted memories. Alternately tender and violent, grotesque and beautiful, with elements of punk and European Clown, in collaboration with the sonic complexities of multi-dimensional percussionist Michael Evans.

Performances
01/24/2019
3:00 pm – 3:30 pm
ZaPow Gallery, Asheville NC
More Information & Tickets

01/26/2019
4:00 pm – 4:30 pm
ZaPow Gallery, Asheville NC
More Information & Tickets

Workshop
Artist Workshop – Improvisation into Performance
01/26/2019
10:00 am – 1:00 pm
Magnetic 375, Asheville NC
More Information

Zack Fuller grew up playing in the forests, streams and meadows of Fairfax County Virginia. As a youth he trained in gymnastics and equestrian vaulting, and studied psycho-physical approaches to acting with Tom Lane, co-founder of The Washington Theatre Lab. In 1985 he joined the post-punk psychedelic metal band Scythian as lead singer, sharing stages with groups such as Bad Brains, Black Market Baby, and Pussy Galore. In 1988, he took a series of workshops with Ryszard Cieslak of the Polish Laboratory Theatre of Jerzy Grotowski, joined Cieslak for theatrical experimentation in Athens Greece, and participated in a year-long theatrical research into Shakespeare’s The Tempest grounded in the work of Cieslak/Grotowski at La Mama ETC after Cieslak’s death in 1990. Eventually he came to focus on dance, training in  contact improvisation, capoeira, and ballet; and working with dancer/choreographers such as Eiko and Koma and Poppo Shiraishi. During this time he began developing a practice of solo dance shaped by his interests in clown, silent film, and esoteric spirituality, as well as the work of certain avant-garde Japanese dance artists associated with the butoh movement.  In 1997 he was cast in Min Tanaka and Susan Sontag’s Poe Project: Stormy Membrane, and went on to perform and train with Tanaka over the next few years throughout Japan, Europe and the U.S. Zack Fuller’s original dance works have been presented by Movement Research at Judson Church, Leimay/CAVE’s New York Butoh Festival, Plan B in Tokyo, Mobius in Boston, The Dance Hakushu Festival, Movement Research at Judson Church, St. Thomas College in Thrissur India, and elsewhere. His collaborators including cutting edge musicians susch as Keiji Haino, Tatsuya Nakatani, Jonathan Wood Vincent, Booker Stardrum, Kat Hernandez, Michael Evans, David Grollman, Kenta Nagai. His latest series of dances: Twisted from Constantly Watching Doves, is a collaboration with dancer/choreographer Emily Smith.

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12 Asheville Butoh Festival

Announcing the 12th Asheville Butoh Festival

Please join us for the Asheville Butoh Festival, now in its twelfth season!
October 25-28, 2018
BeBe Theatre, 20 Commerce Street, Asheville, NC 28801
Buy Tickets

Asheville Butoh Festival Schedule of Events

Performances
Thursday, October 25, 8PM & Sunday, October 28, 7PM
“Black, White, Red and Other”, a solo retrospective by Julie Becton Gillum
General Admission $18, Students and Seniors $15

Friday/Saturday, October 26 and 27, 8PM
Seisaku and Yuri Nagaoko
General Admission $18, Students and Seniors $15

Workshops
Saturday & Sunday, October 27 & 28, 1-5PM
Workshops by Seisaku and Yuri Nagaoko
$40 each

Seisaku and Yuri Nagaoko

Seisaku At age 19, Seisaku started learning Butoh under Tatsumi Hijikata. After Hijikata’s death, he joined the butoh group “Hakutobo” working with Yoko Ashikawa, touring and performing as a dancer both in Japan and internationally. Seisaku has developed his solo dance and group performances as well as directed and choreographed for many theatrical productions.

Yuri Nagaoka, born in Tokyo, began her ballet training at the age of ten. At twelve she joined Hiraoka Shiga Dance Company to learn modern ballet. She took interest in various forms of performing arts and saw many dance and theater performances, encountering Butoh in her late teens. Since then she has been active in creating and showing her own performance pieces, both in Japan and overseas. Yuri has performed and taught workshops in South Korea, Hungary, Poland, Germany, France, United States and Mexico. As an actress, Nagaoka participated in the film “Shureitachi,” directed by Masaki Iwana in 2004.

“Dance Medium” In 2005, Nagaoka founded butoh company “Dance Medium” and began working with Seisaku to create and perform group pieces. In 2012, Nagaoka and Seisaku were awarded a prize from Japan Dance Critics Association for the piece “Kaeru” (Coming Home)

“Black, White, Red and Other”
a solo retrospective by Julie Becton Gillum

Asheville Butoh Festival director, Julie Gillum will present “Black, White, Red and Other,” an evening of four solos, created over the last 17 years. Live accompaniment will be provided for two works by local composer Kimathi Moore and a yet to be named “Elvis” impersonator. Gillum’s butoh influenced work, illustrating both personal and universal themes of the human condition, has been performed at festivals in New York, Chicago, Seattle, Boulder, and Mexico. Love, shifting emotions, faith and sorrow, rendered through flesh and bone . . . the realm of butoh dance.

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Butoh & Archetypal Symbol

Butoh & Archetypal Symbol

Butoh Workshop
August 5, 1-4pm (please arrive at 12:45)
BeBe Theatre
20 Commerce Street, Asheville, NC 28801
Instructor: Jenni Cockrell
Cost: $30 (cash at the door)
More info: strangedaughtersbutoh.com

This workshop investigates how we experience symbol, image and archetype as vital seeds for dance, performance and human experience. Through Laban-Bartenieff based floor work, Butoh exercises and improvisation, we will delve into movement invention and spatial exploration in solo work and with partners. 

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Aspects of Butoh

Aspects of Butoh

Butoh Workshop
July 1, 1-4pm (please arrive at 12:45)
BeBe Theatre
20 Commerce Street, Asheville, NC 28801
Instructor: Julie Gillum
Cost: $30 (cash at the door)
More info: ashevillebutoh.com/legacy-butoh

Aspects of Butoh is an open-level workshop where participants will have the opportunity to explore butoh with a committed performer and teacher of the form. Topics covered include space/time, forces, the senses and the authentic body vessel.

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Tethered: An Evening in Two Parts

Tethered: An Evening in Two Parts

Friday, June 22, 2018, 9:00 PM 10:30 PM
REVOLVE
821 Riverside Drive Asheville, NC, 28801
$10
More information

MAP/REVOLVE presents a two-part program of performance, sound, and video from some of the area’s most interesting innovators, including Asheville Butoh Collective’s Julie Gillum of Legacy Butoh as well as Derek Dominy and Richard Brewster (sound), Denise Carbonell (costume) and Geo Sims (visuals)

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The Dance of Intimacy – Butoh Workshop with Constance Humphries

The Dance of Intimacy – Butoh Workshop with Constance Humphries

June 3, 1-4pm
Instructor: Constance Humphries
Cost: $30
More info: constancehumphries.com, facebook.com/events/402051826930408/ 

In this 3 hour workshop we will practice seeing and being seen through the lens of intimacy. Participants will make the invisible visible, learning more about the vulnerability of the body and mind.

The following areas of practice are highlighted: relationship to time, movement articulation, improvisation, full body engagement, breath, imagination, body/mind states and clarity of consciousness.

Delivered in an approachable atmosphere which facilitate butoh practice in a positive and challenging context of serious play, the workshop is suitable for everyone, including actors, dancers, live/performance artists, musicians and anyone interested in exploring butoh as a means of creative investigation.

All aptitudes and abilities are welcome. No previous experience required. Participants are encouraged to work at their level.

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Dirt, dreams and death

Dirt, dreams and death
a evening of butoh solos

On May 4th and 5th Asheville Butoh Collective presents, Dirt, dreams and death, featuring solo works by ABC’s Jenni Cockrell, Julie Gillum and Constance Humphries.

When: May 4th and 5th, 2018, doors at 7:30, performance at 8PM
Where: Revolve, RAMP SOUTH Studio – 821 Riverside Dr. #179 Asheville, NC 28801
How Much: Tickets $15 @ dirt-dreams-death.bpt.me
More Info: ashevillebutoh.com / revolveavl.org /
strangedaughtersbutoh.com / constancehumphries.com

Mound is an archetypal journey into feminine rites of passage, created and performed by Julie B. Gillum. Composer Ivan Seng will provide novel aurowave companionship in the form of an original soundscape for the piece.

Constance Humphries presents The Daydreamers’ Ball for Strange and Broken Things At the daydreamers’ ball, you can be set free…hush your talk and waltz with me. Two steps and four steps and down the hall, down at the daydreamers’ ball.

Jenni Cockrell/strange daughters butoh premieres arterial spirits, a reimagining of the character of Lady Macbeth exploring power, paradox, memory, love and loss.

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butoh poems by bronwyn preece: julie becton gillum’s five-day workshop

butoh poems by bronwyn preece: julie becton gillum’s five-day workshop

Bronwyn Preece took Julie Gillum’s workshop in Merida and used her words in both english and spanish. They will be included in a new publication, The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance

january 2017

1.

i am
the eyes
beyond
the room :
open
in the
bursting
water
bag of the
cuerpo :
the tension
of flexible
wires in
joints, the
hinges of
barred
windows,
the peel
of the
paint,
the vocabulario
of stillness
in speed,
the music of
plantas,
insects,
animals :
the impulse
of clay, the
improvisation
of contact,
the sculptor
as/of group
membrane
in interchange :
moved
by an outside/
[inside] force
other than my/
our will.
we are
the introductory
translation of
the músculo
of butoh

2.

i am
the mad
puppeteer
stringing
tail to
estrella,
through
wind
and wave,
the marioneta
of the
splintered
floor –
grounding
the sagittal
bounce
of noguchi :
a gymnastics
of smoke &
shadow :
the aire
intimo
of creating
hijikata’s
form with
the soul
following,
ohno’s
corazón,
wherein
form reveals
itself :
becoming
the presence
of presence
becoming :
exploring the
edges of our
lives and
life at and
on the
edge

3.

i am
infinity :
a símbolo
ridden through
history : a
body bag
of currents,
elements :
extreme,
shocking :
never neutral :
big, vulnerable
in an ocean
full of
contaminants,
in a sea of
happy fish,
i am the
hermaphroditic
polluted
pescado,
swimming
upstream :
butoh my
política :
mirroring
through our/
my mask the
[emotional]
exaggeration

4.

i am
the butoh
of
transformation
in these days
and dances
of darkness,
we are both
life and
death, in a
mundo
where time
can move
both forward
and back,
i discover the
world with
fresh ojos,
taking baby
steps, into
the mud of our
cultura, i
crawl towards
flowers – the
desiccation and
the blossoms,
through resistance
and partnership, i/
we find the
semilla of our
humanity…
shared

5.

I am
the fuera
in my
belly,
stamping
the whole
ground
with my body –
one that
will never
be trumped…
as i, along
with these
‘strange little
ladies and
gentlemen’
smell the
mexican
flowers on
our chests —
our hearts –
as we
dance
through the
inauguration ,
we gender –
bend, and
transgress
the dualities,
our imposed
fronteras ,
our walls :
We become
The anti-
stamp, in
our quiet
revolt, we
are earth ,
who never
need(s) to
show the
Soles of
(his/her)
connected feet …

© 2017 bronwyn preece

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Women’s Work

Women’s Work
A weekend of original contemporary works by female choreographers

On March 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Asheville Contemporary Dance Theatre and Kathleen Meyers Leinerhost, Women’s Work, a weekend of original contemporary works by female choreographers. The March, event, celebrating Women’s History Month, offers two program options and workshops with guest Anabella Lenzu and local Asheville choreographers.

When: March 2, 3, 4, 2018
Who: Asheville Contemporary Dance Theatre and Kathleen Meyers Leiner host guest artist Anabella Lenzu and Asheville Choreographers
What: Women’s Work, a weekend of original contemporary works by female choreographers. (Performances and Workshops Friday, Saturday, and Sunday)
Where: BeBe Theatre, 20 Commerce Street, 828-254-2621
How Much: Tickets $18 adults and $15 for students with discounts for multiple shows and workshops. Two Shows $27, two performances + 1 workshop $40, one workshop and performance $30
To purchase tickets,  please call 828-54-2621

Friday, March 2nd & Saturday, March 3rd, 7:30 pm
NYC Guest Choreographer Anabella Lenzu presents “No more Beautiful dances.”
AVL Local Choreographer Kathy Leiner presents “Open-ended.”

Sunday, March 4th, 6:00 pm
AVL choreographers: Asheville Butoh Collective (Jenni Cockrell, Julie Becton Gillum, Constance Humphries), Shari Azar, Susan Collard, Sharon Cooper, Michele Hower, Elizabeth Huntley, Melissa Wilhoit, and Connie Schrader

For tickets please call 828-54-2621
More info: acdt.org