From Asheville Contemporary Dance Theatre:
Asheville Butoh Festival Celebrates 20 Years of Powerful Dance with Special Guest Artist, Yumiko Yoshioka
Asheville, NC — 2016 marks the 10th Asheville Butoh Festival and 20 years of butoh dance in Asheville. Julie Becton Gillum and the Asheville Contemporary Dance Theatre have collaborated to produce this uncommon festival. For Asheville Butoh’s landmark year, we have invited Yumiko Yoshioka, world renowned butoh performer and teacher to share her talents with us. Cities such as Portland, San Francisco, Vancouver, Montreal, New York, Chicago, and Asheville are havens for butoh dance, still finding itself in North America.
What: The 10th Asheville Butoh Festival
When: April 7-10, 2016
Where: All events @ BeBe Theatre, 20 Commerce Street, Asheville, NC
10th Asheville Butoh Festival Schedule of Events
Thursday /Friday April 7, 8 7:30 pm – Before The Dawn
created and performed by Yumiko Yoshioka
General Admission $18, Students and Seniors $15
Saturday, April 9 1:00-5:00 PM Workshop by Yumiko Yoshioka, $40; $75 for both
7:30 Local Color, Asheville’s own butoh crew, $18 /15
Sunday, April 10 1:00-5:00 PM Workshop by Yumiko Yoshioka $40; $75 for both
7:30 pm strange daughters, an evening of solos by Jenni Cockrell
$18 /15
For reservations: BeBe Theatre 828.254.2621
Box Office hours: M – F, 3:00 – 6:00 pm
In honor of our 10th anniversary, Yumiko will perform her seminal work Before the Dawn, a piece that represents butoh at its most profound level of movement exploration and philosophical inquiry. In this evening length epic, Yumiko Yoshioka, through her own transformation, illuminates secrets in our bodies. Her movement and gestures, execute a divine incantation in which she invites the sublime and monstrous beings from dreams and nightmares to dance with her. Her performances will be Thursday, April 7 and Friday, April 8 at 7:30 PM.
Yumiko will teach two butoh and organic movement workshops, Body Resonance, on Saturday, April 9 and Sunday, April 10, 1:00 – 5:00 PM. Cost is $40 for each workshop or $75 for both. The body is a receptacle of time. Body Resonance is a key to open the ever changing world inside and outside of us. The body unfolds its secrets, holding them up until they reverberate within the surrounding Universe. A dance of metamorphosis inevitably appears. One step to metamorphosis! All levels are welcome to this 8 hour corporeal feast. Performances and workshops take place at the BeBe Theatre, 20 Commerce Street in downtown Asheville.
Local contemporary butoh will feature prominently in the Asheville Butoh Festival. Performances by Sara Baird, Jenni Cockrell, Constance Humphries, and Julia Taylor will highlight this year’s anniversary show. Composers Elisa Faires and Meg Mulhearn will make spotlight appearances to accompany local butoh performers.
Butoh originated in post-WWII Japan as an artistic reaction to the chaotic climate in the country following the war and the uneasy shift towards democratic values. Butoh dance is a postmodern movement in which formal dance technique is eschewed in favor of primal and idiosyncratic movements. Butoh was born from an amalgamation of influences including the German Expressionistic dances of Mary Wigman and Harold Kreutzberg, western writers Genet, Artaud and de Sade, and the artistic movements of Surrealism and Dada. Butoh uses the body brazenly, in its most corporeal state, as a battleground to attain personal, social, or political transformations. Butoh dance challenges convention and avoids definition in order to reveal the fervent beauty of the unique human spirit.
Butoh dance has been featured prominently in the Asheville Fringe Arts Festival for the last 14 years. The butoh dance community in Asheville is a strong, vibrant dance community that includes Legacy Butoh, Anemone Dance Theater, strange daughters butoh, and a plethora of individual performers.
Dancer, choreographer, teacher, art director, Yumiko Yoshioka was born in Tokyo, and has been residing in Germany since 1988. In the early seventies and eighties, she was a member of the first women’s Butoh dance company, ARIADONE. In 1978, she performed with Ko Murobushi and Carlotta Ikeda in Paris, in the first Butoh performance outside of Japan. She was also a member of tatoeba- THEATRE DANSE GROTESQUE with Minako Seki and delta RA’i. Yumiko’s art-formation group TEN PEN CHii art labor, is a collaborative company residing at Schloss Broellin in northeastern Germany. Here, Yumiko researches the interactivity between dance, space, and visual art, exploring new zones in body works and performing arts.
Besides international tours throughout Asia, Europe, Oceania and North /South America, Yumiko, in collaboration with delta RA’ i, directs eX…it !, Dance Exchange Research Project. Since 1995, more than 100 artists and dance students from all over the world have participated in this exciting festival of contemporary butoh.
Before you comment
The comments section is here to provide a platform for civil dialogue on the issues we face together as a local community. Xpress is committed to offering this platform for all voices, but when the tone of the discussion gets nasty or strays off topic, we believe many people choose not to participate. Xpress editors are determined to moderate comments to ensure a constructive interchange is maintained. All comments judged not to be in keeping with the spirit of civil discourse will be removed and repeat violators will be banned. See here for our terms of service. Thank you for being part of this effort to promote respectful discussion.