Adam Koan

Adam returns after having engaged in 5 prior butoh intensives at Tiyatro Medresesi. Adam is a half Colombian half Venezuelan-American, raised in the small town of Belleview, Florida who has toured the world performing, teaching, and writing about Butoh.  He is a former facilitator at Himalaya Subbody Butoh and was curator for the 2-week Serbia Butoh Retreat 2019. In his early dance history, he was classically trained in Ballet and Modern Dance.

To Adam, butoh is a means to re-adopt the body and to break out of various limiting habits modern society has thrusted upon our bodies and spirits. The body is an enigma and an entire universe full of wonder, and both surface and shadow are made to eventually dance together in harmony.

Adam’s butoh guiding draws upon a multitude of exercises and perspectives that emphasize the body-mind connection, improvisation, imagination, shamanic motifs, and unlearning. It may be a rich resource for dancers, actors, performance artists, body workers, athletes, psychologists, and more.

Clear instruction is emphasized. The guiding cultivates individual deep creation within and is crafted in such a way that both beginners and experienced practitioners can gain material to construct a personal Butoh body. No experience of any prior discipline needed.

Coco Villarreal

Coco Villarreal was born in Mexico City. There, he studied Opera singing in the Conservatorio Nacional de Música and Literature and Theater in the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

He has experienced theater and music professional work since the age of 16  collaborating in several proposals from opera to contemporary dance and theater. He had work for international theater and dance companies such as Teatro De Ciertos Habitantes (Mexico), Vangeline Theater (USA), De Nuit Comme De tour (Switzerland), Teatro Jorge Eliécer Gaitan (Colombia), Compañía Patricia Guerrero (Spain).

Coco  has directed IX-Butoh Ritual Dance and Theater (originally called Teatro Prieto) since 2009. Performing, directing and teaching in several venues and festivals in Mexico, Colombia, France, Switzerland, Germany, Canada, Maroc, Indonesia, Honduras and Spain.

As  a teacher Coco guided a few hundreds of students coming from different cultures and backgrounds. His goal is to reconnect our daily lives with the human essence of freedom, creativity, expression and healing through our voice and body movement.

He  has been dancing butoh since the age of 19 learning by the hand of Diego Piñón, director of Body Ritual Movement who was disciple of Kazuo and Yoshito Ohno for many years in Japan. Coco also studied with Akira Kassai, Natsue Nakajima, Ken Mai, Yuko Kaseki among others. though his work is inspired by the years of contact and training with Diego combined with Martial Arts, Yoga, body training, singing and Meditation.

He  earned the prize “Best scenic proposal” in 2003 during the XI National Universitary Theater Festival in Mexico.

This will be Coco’s third presence at Stoa. (Theater Madrasa)

Alessia Mallardo

Alessia Mallardo (Medusa) was born in Napoli, South of Italy. She is a butoh dancer and dance therapist, psychologist and researcher of unconscious, sensitive, visible and invisible processes. She likes exploring that border territory between light and shadow, accessing inner spaces. For 20 years, she has been looking for a tool in dance to explore what is inside and bring it out through movement. A visceral dance. 

 

After living and studying in France, travelling in Brazil, searching for ecstatic experiences and rituals such as trance or spirit possession (Candomblé, Voodoo, Umbanda), Alessia met Butoh in 2014. 

She began studying and practicing with Atsushi Takenouchi, and was an assistant at his school in Pontedera, Italy. Her practice is therefore influenced by Atsushi’s Jinen Butoh, although over the years she has also had the opportunity to meet and learn from other masters, such as Saga Kobayashi, Yumiko Yoshioka, Masaki Iwana, Semimaru (Sankai Juku), Minako Seki. She is a regular participant in Noguchi Taiso courses, held by dancer Imre Thormann.

 

In her professional life, she travels, creating performances, participating in festivals and happenings of dance and contemporary art, realising art residency programs, working for public and private institutions with projects for children and animating dance workshops inspired by Dance Therapy and Japanese Butoh, often in collaboration with others guides and artists.

 

For a further look at her work, she always invites to visit her website: www.alessiamallardo.it 

 

We will experiment somatic experiences and embody some useful tools to create a dance (touch, listen, taste, smell, observe). We will also explore Noguchi Taiso. A gymnastics, preparatory to dance, a study of water, weight and the dynamics of movement, designed to relax the body and make it natural, elastic and flexible…as fluid as water. 

Senteri Vikström

Santeri Vikström is a system poet, butoh dancer, artist, and curious wanderer from Helsinki, Finland. His background is in butoh, various wisdom traditions, and improvisation theatre. He has practiced butoh for a decade now and since then he has been building bridges between butoh and various other domains. On the way, he has presented performances and workshops in places such as Finland, India, Germany, Serbia, Belgium, Hungary, Spain, Australia, and so on. 

 

Currently, his main aims are to build systems that help us cultivate some of the aspects of butoh with a model that increases our mental fluency and transformative capacity within the framework of sati(remembering the being-mode/mindfulness), movement, and shadow work.

Co-arising relevance in Butoh and theatrical rituals

In this workshop series, we will go to the basics of listening to the bodymind-spirit to open our capability to
dance life deeper, dance relevant, and significant metamorphosis. We will find our access point to movement, subtle body, and butoh.

The workshops will offer a clear and meditative account and know-how for everybody to empower their transformative possibilities, nourish creativity and open up to the possibility of realizing the relevance inside the framework of the liminal space of ritual, creative movement, and butoh. In this workshop questions like what is profundity in art and how we can take steps towards it will be placed as a collective co-research towards mysteries and depths of the grounds of being.

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