CRS presents an 8-week drop-in Butoh workshop with visiting artist Gio Kusanagi. Gio Kusanagi studied Butoh (Japanese avant-garde dance) with Moe Yamamoto, Toru Iwashita, Kunisuke Kamiryo, Yoshito Ohno (son of Kazuo Ohno), Yukio Waguri, Seisaku & Yuri, Ko Muroboshi, and Kayo Mikami and a Butoh-inspired interpretive dance with Akira Kasai.

The workshop will take place on Mondays from 1 – 2 pm from April 4 – May 23, 2016 and will cost $15/session. In conjunction with the workshop, Gio will present an evening of original dance performance with live music at CRS on Saturday, March 26, 2016 at 8 pm.

CRS has a long history of presenting Butoh performance and training. Butoh artists to teach at CRS in the past include Shinichi Momo Koga, Tanya Calamoneri, and Mariko Endo, among others.

In this workshop, Gio will introduce

1. Kunisuke Kamiryo’s system of instilling the movement impetus within the body by using the sound of vowels, along with Akira Kasai’s spoken words visualization system;
2. Yuri’s warming-up system of movements, along with basic Butoh walking taught by both Moe Yamamoto, Kayo Mikami, and Yoshito Ohno;
3. concepts of “Shin (core),” “softness and hardiness,” “lightness and heaviness,” “eyes at the back,” and “movements from the heart,” taught by Yoshito Ohno;
4. Selection of Butoh-fu with the active use of images that Gio learned from Yukio Waguri, Moe Yamamoto, and Seisaku, as he reorganizes the various Buto-fu through the Rudolf Laban’s four dimensions of efforts: (a) weight (light and heavy); (b) time (sudden and sustained); (c) space (direct focus and multifocus); (d) flow (bound flow and free flow).  Furthermore, Gio will introduce a technique to create a new Buto-fu on your own by translating a 2D image into 4D time-space-continuum.

The workshop will culminate with the last session in which participants will be encouraged to create their own Buto-fu and informally share each other’s original Butoh dance.

The purpose of this workshop is not to expose the participants to the entire scope of Butoh. Rather, the workshop is designed to provide the participants with the opportunity to experience some of the essential elements of Butoh and thus allowing them to have an insight on how some of these Butoh principles and vocabularies can be applied to new choreographic ideas and inspirations.  This will be an excellent workshop for choreographers who are looking for new choreographic inspiration, dancers or physical actors who wish to widen the range of their movement vocabularies, or healthy adults who are seeking the self-exploration by deepening one’s understanding of the internal psyche, as “the true goal of Butoh is not to impose choreographed movements from outside but to allow the movements to emerge from inside, and structures are merely the gateways to the ‘inside,’” according to Tatsumi Hijikata.