Workshop Butoh Intensives with Joan Laage

Embodying the Spirit: the body finds its way

Taught by Joan Laage/Kogut Butoh

This workshop is a process of erasing and re-creating the body through guided improvisation inspired by nature imagery and Ukiyoe prints.

“It’s as though the experience of dropping into my sea body, 

flower forms and wind through my bones, 

is continuing to inform my movements, my stillness.” 

- Workshop participant (Portland OR)

Experience training methods towards a supple body and mind and investigate aesthetics common to butoh through creative explorations. ETS explores endless questions: What is life? What is the human condition? What is the body? The workshop structure includes explorations of physical, natural, and transforming bodies. Partner work will facilitate participants’ individual and collective journeys. In this workshop we will focus on the elemental body and work with famous Japanese Ukiyoe wood block prints to create movement sequences inspired by Joan’s time with Gnome, Yoko Ashikawa’s company. The workshop draws from Joan’s training with Butoh Masters Kazuo and Yoshito Ohno and Ashikawa in Tokyo, Atsushi Takenouchi in Europe and her background as a Tai Chi practitioner and professional gardener.

Schedule

• Friday 05.05. WORKSHOP 17:00 - 21:00 
• Saturday 06.05. WORKSHOP 17:30 - 21:30 
• Sunday 07.05.  Performance "In Flight" 19:00 - 20:00

About Joan Laage/Kogut Butoh

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