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Noguchi Taiso and Butoh with Julie Becton Gillum
Friday May 20th: 3:30 - 8:30 pm, Saturday & Sunday May 21 & 22: 11:00 am - 4:00 pm
$60/day OR $150 for all 3 days, in person at the Headwaters Theater
Register / for more info, Email: jbgbutoh@gmail.com
Julie Becton Gillum: Gillum’s training in butoh began in 1997, with five summers at the San Francisco Butoh Festival. “CAIRN,” her first butoh based choreography, was presented at the opening of 2002 SF Butoh Festival, at Yerba Buena Gardens. Since then she has created and presented major works in the genre at a variety of venues in the US, Mexico, Cuba, Asia and France.
Gillum’s 50 year career includes founding and touring three modern dance companies, work as artist-in-residence teaching, performing and choreographing for musical theatre throughout the southeastern US, and finally 17 years teaching Butoh, Performance Art, Modern Dance, Body and Earth at Warren Wilson College. Gillum retired in 2014. Since then she has been touring extensively outside of the US including India, Turkey, Ukraine, Serbia, Georgia, Spain, Germany, Czech Republic and Finland. Gillum received the prestigious North Carolina Choreography Fellowship (2008 /09) to travel to Japan and study butoh at its source.
“13 Aspects of Butoh” is a writing and research project, begun in 2009 during this study of butoh and immersion into Japanese culture. She will be sharing material from her research during the Headwaters workshops. Gillum studied with master butoh artists throughout the world. Primary teachers of butoh are Yoshito Ohno, Natsu Nakajima, Anzu Furukawa, Diego Piñon, Hiroko and Koichi Tamano, Yukio Waguri, Seisaku and Yuri Nagaoka. Noguchi Taiso mentors are Mari Osanai, Itto Morito and Semimaru.
In order to bring the beloved butoh legacy to her hometown, she created the Asheville Butoh Festival. Over 14 seasons, the Asheville Butoh Festival has hosted national and international butoh artists to share performance and guide butoh practice. In training with these unrecognized living national treasures, Gillum discovered a body of common aspects that pervades all of butoh as well as features that distinguish it from other dance forms. Within every sensei’s rich butoh fu (unique poetic language for movement invention, highly developed by Hijikata), she discovered broad universal patterns, motifs and connections across each individual’s imagery.
Each day Julie will also introduce Noguchi Taiso (exercises) as warm-up. This practice is slow and gentle, perfect for all bodies and a fabulous companion to butoh. Both butoh and Noguchi Taiso developed in post-World War II Japan during the 1950's. Michizo Noguchi, a gymnastics coach and founder of this method, was confronted with a realization that when everything else is gone the body still remains alive and subject to gravity. He used the body as a primary source and tool for developing a new kind of movement practice based on principles of nature, the way matter moves in space and time. The human body is 70% water, the rest is earth materials. Noguchi proposes that natural effort-free movement does not fight gravity but embraces it, using its force to assist the movement. A main principle of Noguchi Taiso is movement as a reaction. Instead of making a movement intentionally the practitioner creates the conditions for the movement to arise as a natural response. Noguchi Taiso has been adopted by many butoh, dance and theatre practitioners in Japan especially for its ability to empty the body of various learned, superficial and culturally derived patterns of behavior, making it more transparent and aligning it with the more universal forces that are at play
"The materials that constitute our bodies are undoubtedly of this earth and have participated in and experienced the creation process . . . Our body, living here and now, includes the history of the earth." Michizo Noguchi.
Here are some videos on YOUTUBE about Noguchi Taiso including some that you can follow along.
Embodying the Spirit: the body finds its way Taught by Joan Laage (Kogut Butoh)
Saturday May 14th 9-4pm, at Headwaters Theater
Contact: interartistsmotion@gmail.com www.interartistsmotion.org
This workshop is a process of erasing and re-experiencing the body through guided improvisation largely inspired by nature imagery. 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?
In this workshop we will focus on imagery from the Earth Tomes Project, which has been performed in collaboration with local artists in Germany, Italy, England, Norway, an upstate New York residency and in the NW in Seattle and Port Townsend. Earth imagery – earth, trees, roots, stones – will be layered with explorations of the elemental body (water, wind, etc.) as we celebrate the body as nature. Partner work will facilitate participants’ individual and collective journeys.
The workshop draws from Joan’s training with Butoh Masters Kazuo and Yoshito Ohno and Yoko Ashikawa in Tokyo and her background as a Tai Chi practitioner and professional gardener. Bio: Joan Laage (Kogut) studied under butoh masters Kazuo Ohno and Yoko Ashikawa and performed with Ashikawa’s group Gnome in Japan in the late 80s and has enjoyed training with Atsushi Takenouchi for many years. After settling in Seattle in 1990, she formed Dappin’ Butoh, a company known for its appearances in Seattle’s fringe theater and dance festivals. Joan has performed and taught at national and international butoh festivals, was a featured artist at the UCLA Butoh Symposium in May 2011 and has been an adjunct faculty at Cornish College of The Arts (Seattle). She was on the faculty at the Portland International Performance Institute from 1996-97. Joan is featured in Dancing Into Darkness: Butoh, Zen, And Japan and Butoh: Metamorphic Dance and Global Alchemy by Sondra Horton Fraleigh and Tanya Calamoneri’s Butoh America. Her site-specific “Wandering & Wondering” is an event at the Seattle Japanese and Kubota Gardens. Joan is a founding member of DAIPANbutoh Collective which produces an annual butoh festival in Seattle.