In Flight - Butoh Performance

About the Performance

Hybrid Butoh Performance by Joan Lage / Kogut with live music from Christoph Punzmann 

“Emotions were clearly running high as Joan Laage, who also goes by the name of Kogut Butoh, another polished butoh dancing veteran of multiple decades, opened Saturday night’s show with a brilliant solo performance, elegantly woven into the fabric of this evening’s loss, yet still transcending its sadness to deliver a whimsical tribute to the woman’s body and menstrual cycle in Rivers Running Red.” 

- Erez Kats, Quixotic Entertainment (Rivers Running Red, Seattle Butoh Festival 2021)

*****

About Joan Lage 

After studying with Kazuo Ohno and Yoko Ashikawa in Tokyo in the late 80s and performing with Ashikawa’s group Gnome, Joan Laage settled in Seattle and directed Dappin’ Butoh from 1990-2001. She is a co-founder of DAIPANbutoh Collective, which produces an annual butoh festival. Joan has performed at many festivals including the first New York butoh festival and at Vienna’s Hybrid Butoh Festival and Paris’ En Chair et en Son Acousmatic Festival in 2022, and has been invited by Vangeline to present a solo in New York City in April 2023. She has taught workshops and performed in Freiburg, Basel, Oslo, Milan, Warsaw, London, and Liverpool and was a featured artist at the Winterwerft Festival in Frankfurt. A Ph.D. from Texas Woman’s University, who wrote on the butoh body and Certified Movement Analyst (NYC), she is featured in Sondra Fraleigh’s books and in Tanya Calamoneri’s Butoh America. She creates site-specific work for Seattle Japanese gardens annually and tours every winter in Europe. Since living in Krakow 2004–2006, she has been known as Kogut (rooster). www.seattlebutoh-laage.com; https://www.facebook.com/joan.laage