The 10th Asheville Butoh Festival takes place April 7-10

PRESS RELEASE:

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.