"Exploring & Expressing Our Roots Through Butoh Dance" Lecture / Workshop at Humboldt State University (Arcata, CA) – 2019/03/02

I’m thrilled to be giving a FREE 3-hour lecture / workshop on Butoh Dance at Humboldt University’s 25th Annual Social Justice Summit.

Exploring & Expressing Our Roots Through Butoh Dance
Saturday, March 2, 2019, 9am – 12pm in the Kate Buchanan Room at Humboldt State University
part of the 25th Annual Social Justice Summit at Humboldt State University
Ankoku Butoh, the “dance of utter darkness” is an avant-garde movement form from post-WWII Japan. Originally conceived as a renunciation of commercialism, commodification, and Western influence, Butoh’s founders aimed to rediscover and present the “native Japanese body” along with its taboos, grotesqueness, and abject glory. 60 years later, Butoh Dance has become an internationally practiced technology for exploring and expressing our roots, as well as our best hopes for the future.
Participants in this workshop should come prepared to move.
This workshop aims to provide a practical and artistic approach to the question “Who am I?” and the notion of going “Back to our roots.” Through meditative movement practices, workshop participants will explore ways of dis-identifying from their traditional constellations of self-knowledge. From here play with embodying and being moved by images of elements, materials, animals, and other archetypal energies will give participants opportunities to develop a sense of agency and play, to connect with a universal cosmic energy, and to reconstruct themselves as in relationship with a variety of “roots.”