Bio

Julie is the founder and artistic director of the Asheville Butoh Festival. She has been creating, performing and teaching dance in the US, Europe, Asia and Mexico for over 40 years. She has studied and practiced Noguchi Taiso and butoh for 25 years.Since 2019 she has been active in Turkey, Ukraine, India and other areas in eastern Europe. Julie has received numerous grants and awards for her choreography. She was awarded the 2008-09 NC Choreography Fellowship and used the funds to travel to Japan to study Butoh, her primary form of artistic expression.

Workshop Details

Lesson Plan: Gillum’s intention is to introduce Noguchi Taiso as a warm up and perfect companion to butoh; afterwards she will guide lessons selected from “13 Aspects of Butoh” based on her personal research and writing. Both butoh and Noguchi Taiso developed in post-World War ll Japan during the 1950’s and ’60’s. Noguchi Taiso is slow and gentle, great for all bodies. Noguchi Taiso supports all possibilities by building a strong rooted core connected to gravity and responsive to both internal and external forces. The Noguchi water body is prepared to move from its most neutral place, in the most natural way, toward the most abstract, precarious or specific directions possible.

Gillum has been creating and sharing workshops based on her research into “13 Aspects of Butoh” since 2010. Some of the concepts such as Space, Time and Force are basic to all dance. However some are more specific to butoh and Japanese aesthetics: “The Face”, “Ghost of Self”, “Dance Like A Child”, “Every Dance Is A Prayer”, “Masculine and Feminine”.

Noguchi Taiso

“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

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 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, aligning it with the more universal forces that are at play.

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 move intentionally the practitioner creates the conditions for the movement to arise as a natural response.

CillaVee (Claire Elizabeth Barratt) is an interdisciplinary artist who specializes in performance installation. She is the founding director of Cilla Vee Life Arts (established 2002, Bronx NY) and The Center for Connection + Collaboration in Asheville, NC. She has received a number of awards, including project sponsorship from JP Morgan Chase, NYSCA and the NEA. She served an apprenticeship with the Isadora Duncan Dance Foundation and holds an MFA in Creative Practice from the Transart Institute for Creative Research with Plymouth University where she developed the Living Art performance pedagogy. She was a Co-Founder and Director for Circle Modern Dance and a Choreographer for the Knoxville Opera Company in Tennessee. Claire has presented work through Jacob’s Pillow, Wave Hill, Chashama, Bronx Council on the Arts, Vision Festival/Arts For Art, Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center and Art Basel Miami. She performs and teaches internationally.

Workshop Details

My work is interdisciplinary, often collaborative, usually improvization-based
It utilizes any mediums that can be incorporated into a performative context
These include, but are not limited to: movement, dance, choreography, sound, music, composition, text, poetry, spoken and written word, moving and still image, visual arts, installation, environmental interaction and public intervention.
I am invested in the experience of the audience member as participant and of the artist as observer.
I am conscious of opening possibility for their journey.
I play a dual role as artist / facilitator – whether directly or indirectly.
I challenge conventions – not for the sake of anarchy per se, but for the sake of what seems most appropriate for the work itself.
I will push boundaries; yet still hold artistic integrity as priority over
experimentation.
However, in cases where the experiment IS the art, there can be no conflict

I have developed a practice I call Living Art.
A performance methodology evolved through years of work.
It serves as a pedagogy, a daily practice and a method for creative development. “Which came first, the method or the art?”
The art is in the method and the method is in the art. It is only once I begin to
deconstruct my process that I am able to define what has been evolving as a
unified system in life, work, creating and facilitating for as long as I can
remember.
And even then I don’t claim to have invented any of it
“… It is impossible to say where these ideas actually originated, because they are timeless and belong to the natural principles of movement, time and space. Over the years we have simply articulated a set of names for things that already exist, things that we do naturally and have always done …”
(Anne Bogart)

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 and guest teaching and performing during his workshops in Europe. 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 regularly performs and teaches in Europe, mostly in England, Germany, Italy, Spain, Norway, Sweden and Poland, where she lived from 2004-2006 and took the performance name Kogut (rooster). Joan is featured in Dancing Into Darkness: Butoh, Zen, And Japan and Butoh: Metamorphic Dance and Global Alchemy by Sondra Horton Fraleigh and the newly released Butoh America by Tanya Calamoneri. Her site-specific “Wandering & Wondering” is an annual event at the Seattle Japanese and Kubota Gardens. Joan is a founding member of DAIPANbutoh Collective which produces an annual butoh festival in Seattle. She frequently offers intensive weekend workshops and directs site-specific group works in Port Townsend (WA) and beyond for Salish Sea Butoh, organized by Cosmo Rapaport, Sophia Solano and Iván Daniel Espinosa.

Workshop Details

As an artist, I continually ask myself: what does it mean to be human? How do human beings manifest as part of nature? How can I remain fully human in a world that increasingly emphasizes materialism and technology, thus alienating us from nature? This workshop is a process of erasing and re-creating 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? 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 deeply on nature elements (water, wind, etc,) and layer bird and flower imagery with the famous Japanese Ukiyoe wood block prints, inspired by Joan’s experience’s under Yoko Ashikawa’s directorship. We will also explore material (earth, roots, trees) from Joan’s work Earth Tomes, in hopes of being able to perform this hour-long piece at the end of the workshop. For the Earth Tomes Project, Joan has collaborated with performers in Liverpool, London, Freiburg, Warsaw, Oslo, Pontedera, Seattle and Port Townsend (WA). The workshop draws from Joan’s training with Butoh Masters Kazuo and Yoshito Ohno and Ashikawa in Tokyo and her background as a long-time Tai Chi practitioner and professional gardener.

Dates of the Camp

Between November 7 – December 16 2022 (6 weeks)

The workshops will take place from Monday to Friday, every day between 10.00 – 17.30. 13.00 – 14.30 is lunch time.

Schedule

Week 1: Nov 7 – 11 — Julie

Weeks 2 and 3: November 14 – 25 — Julie

Week 4: November 28 – December 2 — Joan Laage

Week 5: December 5 – 9: — Joan Laage & CillaVee

Week 6: December 12 – 16 — CillaVee

Kamp Tarihi

7 Kasım- 16 Aralık 2022 tarihleri arasında her hafta

Atölyeler Pazartesi’den Cuma’ya Her Gün 10.00 – 17.30 saatleri arasında gerçekleşecektir. 13.00 – 14.30 öğle yemeği saatidir.