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FemAlchemy: Seattle Butoh Festival 2021<\/h2>\nFemAlchemy: Seattle Butoh Festival 2021<\/h2>\nby Justin Jesty<\/p>\n
Seattle dance collective DAIPANbutoh held their annual butoh festival, November 19-21 at the Yaw Theater in Seattle\u2019s Georgetown neighborhood. Spanning three nights of performance and two afternoon workshops, the festival was a tour-de-force, featuring eight original performances centered on the work of DAIPANbutoh members and visiting dancer and choreographer, Vangeline. Several of the performances included original music, poetry, and costume design and were accompanied live musical performance, creating an immersive, multi-sensory exploration of women\u2019s ancestral experience and a meditative celebration of the powers of women\u2019s bodies.<\/p>\n
Butoh is an expressionist form of modern dance that originated in Japan post-1945 and has since spread around the world. Its pioneers Hijikata Tatsumi (1928-1986) and Ohno Kazuo (1906-2010) opposed orthodoxy and codification and, in avant-garde fashion, understood butoh as a way of life, beyond the boundaries of art and stage. Butoh\u2019s permeability and exploratory orientation have enabled it to flourish as one of the most generative forms of contemporary performance, while its vision of alternative lifestyles intersects with yoga, somatics, meditation, and low impact living. At its most fundamental, butoh\u2019s understanding of life reaches beyond the individual: people are born and die in cycles that interconnect all things across and through the individual body. The DAIPANbutoh website and festival pamphlet feature two quotes from Hijikata that offer slightly different perspectives on this principle. \u201cWe shake hands with the dead, who send us encouragement from beyond our body; this is the unlimited power of Butoh,\u201d and \u201cBe reborn always and everywhere, again and again.\u201d As a form of dance, butoh seeks to allow the body to move in dis-integrated ways so that it can register subconscious, unassimilated impulses.<\/p>\n
Women have historically been marginalized in the butoh\u2019s canon\u2014a problem that this year\u2019s festival drew attention to with its theme, FemAlchemy. Given that butoh is so critical of the modern ideology of man as unitary, rational, and self-determining, women\u2019s experiences and perspectives are a source of special value. Each performance touched on the theme, but were diverse in tone and style. In Eternity 123<\/em>, Vangeline began with an achingly disciplined posture, her figure adorned in an elaborately embroidered white gown brightly lit by a spotlight directly overhead. As minutes passed, her hands rose into the air and faint, whisper-like movements emerged, first in the fingers, eventually arriving at the clasp that would undo the first layer of the gown. The piece traced a \u201csymbolic journey of women\u2019s emancipation across time\u201d yet the tension between intense static poses and faint movements above and beyond remained all the way to the end. Joan Laage\u2019s Rivers Running Red<\/em> explored a series of associations with the cycle of menstruation while Alycia Scott Zollinger\u2019s Murmur <\/em>composed \u201ca somatic ode to the complexities of becoming and being a mother.\u201d Robyn Bjornson\u2019s Grandmother\u2019s Hands <\/em>and Sheri Brown\u2019s Red Wolfe Dragonfly<\/em> explored transformation and life course, Bjornson\u2019s piece particularly good at building rhythmic compositions from infant-like impulsive movements. Helen Thorsen\u2019s Pearl <\/em>began with the dancers emerging from colorful soft shells and reveled in the irreverent, clownish side of butoh. Kaoru Okumura and Aoi Lee\u2019s piece AWAHI\u2014World of Woe, The Pure Land<\/em> was inspired by Eugene Smith\u2019s photographs of Minamata, and was accompanied by noh chanting performed by Kanoh Satoko. Dhyana Garc\u00eda\u2019s Sakti: Exquisite Complexity <\/em>used black costumes and a geometric headpiece that covered the dancer\u2019s entire head to suggest more abstract qualities of relationship, refusing the flesh-and-bone understanding of the body that tends to dominate butoh. Two UW students Emma Parkinson, and Yutong Sun and one WWU alumni Kintla Wheeler, participated in the performance.<\/p>\n The festival explored the female body\u2019s connectedness to celestial rhythms, to memories accumulated in the transgenerational echoes of habit and sensibility, and to other lives in the ongoing event of birth and rebirth. Together the performances testified to the strength, resilience, and boundless creativity that come from outside the self, in moments of precarious transformation and in offering oneself up to interconnection with others.<\/p>\n * Unless otherwise noted all citations come from DAIPANbutoh\u2019s website: https:\/\/www.daipanbutohcollective.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" FemAlchemy: Seattle Butoh Festival 2021 by Justin Jesty Seattle dance collective DAIPANbutoh held their annual butoh festival, November 19-21 at the Yaw Theater in Seattle\u2019s Georgetown neighborhood. Spanning three nights of performance and two afternoon workshops, the festival was a tour-de-force, featuring eight original performances centered on the work of DAIPANbutoh members and visiting dancer<\/p>\n