Joan Laage is a choreographer, performer and dance educator who is regarded as the pioneer of Butoh in the Pacific Northwest. While living in Japan, Joan studied and trained with Yoko Ashikawa (the major disciple of Butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata) and with Butoh master Kazuo Ohno in Tokyo.  Joan performed with Yoko Ashikawa’s legendary Butoh troupe, Gnome, in the 1980’s and is one of the few non-Japanese dancers to have trained with Ashikawa. Joan continues to performs internationally ever year and she has been a featured artist at national and international Butoh festivals since the 1990’s including the New York Butoh Festival and the UCLA Butoh Symposium. Her pioneering PhD dissertation research titled “Embodying The Spirit: The Paradox of Performing The Body in Butoh” has been presented at dozens of academic conferences and symposiums around the world. 

In addition to over 35 years of teaching and thousands of performances over the years, Joan Laage is responsible for bringing the art form of Butoh to Seattle in 1990.  She continues to perform annually at the Seattle Japanese Garden, where she is a docent, and at the Kubota Garden Foundation.  Joan's work is highlighted in the award-winning books “DANCING INTO DARKNESS: BUTOH, ZEN AND JAPAN” and “Butoh: Metamorphic Dance and Global Alchemy” by dance scholar Sondra Fraleigh as well as “BUTH AMERICA: Butoh Dance in the United States and Mexico from 1970 to the early 2000s” by Tanya Calamoneri.

Born in 1946 in Mie Prefecture, Japan, SAGA KOBAYASHI is a world-renowned Butoh dancer, choreographer and teacher who is one of the last surviving members of Butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata’s original Butoh company that is still active and performing to this day. Kobayashi began her prolific career in Butoh when she entered Hijikata’s dance studio in 1969 and trained directly with him at his legendary Asbestos-kan theater. Kobayashi became one of Hijikata’s principal dancers and performed in Hijikata’s most important productions from the end of the 1960’s to the mid-1970’s, along with his other core dancers Yoko Ashikawa, Momoko Nimura, Koichi Tamano, Moe Yamamoto, and Yukio Waguri.

She played an important part in the establishment of ANKOKU BUTŌ in the 1970’s by dancing in Hijikata’s seminal performance Twenty-Seven Nights for Four Seasons in 1972 held at Art Theater Shinjuku Culture, in the opening performance of Seibu Theater’s The Quiet House, and in Hijikata’s 1973 production Summer Storm. After becoming an independent dancer in 1975, Kobayashi returned to work with Hijikata for her 1977 solo performance Bitter Light, which he choreographed for her. In 1983, Kobayashi went on tour all over Europe to perform Hijikata’s choreography BREASTS OF JAPAN with Yoko Ashikawa. Through her company Saga Kobayashi + NOSURI, she has been active internationally as a choreographer and Butoh dancer for over 40 years. Besides performing her own choreographies for solo and group, Kobayashi actively collaborates with music, video, and theater artists. She also collaborates often with the Hijikata Tatsumi Archive at Keio University Art Center launched in 1998. At nearly eighty years old, she is still teaching, choreographing, and performing today.

SEISAKU is a Butoh dancer, teacher and performing artist born and raised in Fukushima, Japan. In 1984 he met Butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata and trained with him at his Asbestos-kan theater. In 1985, he danced in Hijikata’s acclaimed performance Tohoku Kabuki, a seminal choreography that would go on to influence many future Butoh artists. Seisaku studied with and danced under Hijikata continuously until Hijikata’s death in 1986. Seisaku speaks about how he was struck by the power of Hijikata’s artistry: “the impact of Hijikata’s Butoh dance was so tremendous. One after another, Hijikata opened many doors to deep truths that I had never known before.”

After the death of Hijikata, Seisaku joined the Hakutobo Butoh troupe with members of the Asbestos-kan at the time, centered around Yoko Ashikawa. Seisaku danced with Hakutobo until 1996 and performed in all of their main productions. After leaving the company, he worked as a solo artist for many years before joining DANCE MEDIUM in 2004, a group directed by Yuri Nagaoka. Since then, Seisaku has collaborated with Yuri as co-choreographer and has performed in all of the group’s major works. In 2011, Seisaku created a Butoh piece called "Kiri" about the earthquake and nuclear power destruction that occurred in his hometown of Fukushima. This performance won the Grand Prize of the Japan Dance Critics Association in 2012. Seisaku has performed and taught overseas in over 10 different countries. In 2025, he was invited to the CONGRESS OF BUTOH SOULS, a festival in Hong Kong that brought together many legendary Butoh dancers to perform at the City University of Hong Kong’s School of Creative Media.

YURI NAGAOKA, born and raised in Tokyo, began to study ballet and modern dance at the age of 10, and then discovered Butoh in her late teenage years. After experiencing numerous Butoh performances by Dairakudakan, Kô Murobushi, Ariadone, Akira Kasai, Kazuo Ohno, Dance Love Machine and others, Yuri became highly interested in Butoh and the use of physical expression as counterculture. While continuing her ballet and modern dance training, she met and studied Butoh with Masasaku, a former member of Hakutobo, from 1993—2003. Through this training, she learned the techniques and essence of Tatsumi Hijikata’s Butoh.

In 2004, Yuri founded the Butoh company DANCE MEDIUM, and together with Seisaku, she continues to actively create and present Butoh performances as a group as well as solo Butoh works. In 2011, she co-created "Kiri, a piece inspired by the 2011 Fukushima earthquake and nuclear disaster. The piece won the Japan Dance Critics Association Award and was praised for its broad perspective on the world and life, the hope of people recovering from tragic disasters, and its excellent Butoh choreography. Throughout the decades, Yuri has performed in France, Germany, Poland, England, Australia, China, Korea, Mexico City, and New York.

Born in Hyogo, Japan, YUMI UMIUMARE is an established Butoh dancer, choreographer and teacher based in Australia. After training with Akaji Maro and touring with his world-renowned Japanese Butoh company DAIRAKUDAKAN, Yumi moved to Melbourne in 1993 and is known as a pioneer of Japanese Butoh in Australia. She has been creating her distinctive style of performance works for over 30 years and her creations are renowned for provoking visceral emotions and engaging with multicultural identities with a sense of humor. Yumi’s works have been seen in numerous festivals in dance and theatre throughout Australia, Japan, Europe, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia and have received several fellowships from the Australian Council (2015-16) and the winner of the Green Room Award in 2017 for her contribution to Contemporary Performance. Her major productions include the DasSHOKU Butoh Cabaret series (1999-2014), EnTrance (2009-2012) and the recent PopUp Tearoom series which has been performed and experimented over 20 locations nationally and internationally.

Yumi is a key figure of the international contemporary Butoh scene and she has served as the Artistic Director of the ButohOUT! festival in Melbourne since 2017, teaching and activating local and international Butoh communities.  Through her innovative work, Yumi has challenged traditional notions of what Butoh is and how it can be performed, and has helped to broaden its scope both locally and abroad.  Yumi's commitment to exploring new forms of expression and collaboration has helped kept Butoh relevant and exciting in the 21st century.

ESPARTACO MARTÍNEZ is a Latino Butoh dancer and theater artist based in Mexico who has been actively studying and performing the art of Butoh since the 1980’s. A graduate in acting and theater from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Espartaco’s artistic journey has been one of constant evolution and collaboration. During a five-year period of intensive training in Japan, Espartaco had the honor of being one of the few non-Japanese dancers to perform with the legendary Butoh company DAIRAKUDAKAN under the guidance of Butoh master Maro Akaji. His career was further enriched through collaborations with Japanese luminaries like Kumotaro Mukai, Takuya Muramatsu, Kudo Taketeru, and Daisuke Yoshimoto, as well as with recent collaborations with Butoh artists Natsu Nakajima and Ichihara Akihito of Sankai Juku. Espartaco has also performed with influential avant-garde groups such as the epic Bread and Puppet Theatre in Vermont, the mystic punk Derevo Theater, and the theater of caress led by the illustrious clown, Danielle Finzi Pasca. Over the decades, Espartaco has performed at festivals and stages across the globe, from Brazil, Colombia, and Costa Rica to the United Staes, South Korea, Japan, France, Germany, Switzerland, and throughout Mexico. His work continues to provoke introspection and challenge conventional perceptions, inviting audiences into a realm where movement and expression meld into an immersive exploration of the human experience. Espartaco’s career journey is featured in the book BUTOH AMERICA: Butoh Dance in the United States and Mexico from 1970 to the early 2000s.

Rosemary Candelario is a dancer, choreographer and scholar-artist based in Austin. She serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at The University of Texas in Austin. Rosemary writes about and makes dances engaged with ecology, butoh, Asian and Asian-American dance, and site-specific performance. Her choreography has been produced across the United States and in Japan.  Rosemary creates solo works for the stage and outdoor site-specific ensemble works through which the audience moves, both largely focused on exploring how dance develops relationships between humans and the environment.

Recent artistic premieres include aqueous at the 2019 Kyoto Butoh Festival in Japan and 100 Ways to Kiss the Trees in Denton, Texas.  She is the recipient of the 2018 Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research for her book Flowers Cracking Concrete: Eiko & Koma's Asian/American Choreographies (Wesleyan University Press 2016).  Rosemary is also the co-editor with Bruce Baird of The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance (2018). She co-founded and co-produced the 2019 BUTOH NEXT international symposium in New York City. She holds a PhD in Culture and Performance from UCLA.  www.rosemarycandelario.net 

Eugenia Vargas is a dancer, choreographer, teacher, curator, and artistic researcher from Mexico City.  She is the founder and director of Laboratorio Escénico Danza Teatro Ritual (LEDTR), a performance troupe and artistic venue that has served not only as an incubator for dance and interdisciplinary projects but also as an artistic residence and formative training space for Butoh in Mexico, from which several generations of artists have emerged or have been influenced.  Vargas is co-founder and director of Cuerpos en Revuelta: Festival Internacional de Danza Butoh, one of the premier Butoh festivals of Latin America.  She is also the founder of the Butoh México Archive with which she is currently organizing the ongoing Seminar “Thinking from the body with and against butoh.”  In 2022, Vargas organized “Encrucijada: mujeres en el butoh”, an initiative that brought together artists from Japan, Argentina, Chile and Mexico.

Eugenia Vargas has trained and studied with some of the most renowned Butoh teachers in the world including Japanese Butoh pioneer Natsu Nakajima and the late Yukio Waguri.  Vargas has co-produced and co-performed numerous choreographic productions with Nakajima and Waguri and with Tadashi Endo.  For nearly three decades, Vargas has performed in Japan, Mexico, Spain, Colombia, Peru, Chile and Canada, and she has also performed original works at important international butoh festivals such as the Women Defining Butoh Festival in New York City, the Dance Dance Dance Festival in Yokohama, Japan, and the Festival Internacional de Butoh Chile (FiButoh) in Santiago de Chile.  Her work has been recognized in many published books, including “Butoh: Cradling Empty Space” by Vangeline and “BUTOH AMERICA: Butoh Dance in the United States and Mexico from 1970 to the Early 2000s” by Tanya Calamoneri.

Ari Rudenko is an interdisciplinary visual and performing artist, and the Artistic Director and Founder of Prehistoric Body Theater based in Indonesia. Prehistoric Body Theater (PBT) is an experimental art-science performance company based at their collective artist studio in the jungles of Central Java, Indonesia. The PBT ensemble consists of indigenous Indonesian dancers and performing artists, all steeped in traditional and ritual dance lineages from across the archipelago. Their artwork is a synthesis of traditional dance techniques and cultural practices, cutting-edge experimental stagecraft, and ongoing collaborative research with an international panel of mentor scientists, who help the ensemble craft dance characters and narratives deeply informed by the latest paleontological theory and evidence. Ari Rudenko’s approach to performance-creation is rooted in a study of the natural world, in combination with extensive training in Japanese Butoh theatre as well as Indonesian traditional dance. For well over a decade, Ari has studied with numerous Butoh teachers and has completed dance training intensives with renowned Butoh companies Dairakudakan and Sankai Juku. Ari’s latest work with Prehistoric Body Theater investigates the potential of employing the latest paleontological models to tell epic tales from the prehistoric record and the cladographic Tree of Life with the human body. Ari grew up in the mossy San Juan Islands of Western Washington off the Pacific Northwest coast. He received a Masters of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College, and holds a PhD in Dance Creation Studies from the Indonesian Institute of the Arts.

Tadashi Endo was a world-renowned Japanese Butoh dancer, choreographer and Butoh teacher based in Göttingen, Germany. Tadashi was the director of the Butoh-Centre MAMU and artistic director of the Butoh-Festivals MAMU Butoh & Jazz in Göttingen.  After his study as a theatre director at the famous Max-Reinhardt-Seminar in Vienna, he performed in collaboration with a wide variety of jazz musicians.  Tadashi Endo has served as a guest artist at the Hochschule für Darstellende Kunst Frankfurt am Main, Germany, The Academy of Music and Dance in Jerusalem, Israel, and at the Nucleo Interdisciplinar des Pesyuisas TeatrUnicamp, University Campinas, Brazil.  In 1989, Tadashi met and studied with Kazuo Ohno and was deeply influenced by Ohno for the rest of his life.

In 2008, Tadashi performed a special guest performance in the award-winning film Kirschblüten-Hanami (Cherry Blossoms) directed by renowned German filmmaker Doris Dörrie.  In 2009, Tadashi choreographed Georg Friedrich Händel's opera Admeto, directed by Doris Dörrie and performed at the Edinburgh International Festival in Scotland. As a choreographer, Tadashi also collaborated with Doris Dörrie on the opera Madame Butterfly (Theater am Gärtnerplatz München 2006), the cinema film HANAMI-KIRSCHBLÜTEN (2007), and DON GIOVANNI (Hamburgische Staatsoper 2011, 2012). In all these productions, Tadashi Endo also performed as a guest solo dancer. In his Butoh artistry, Tadashi strived to embody a synthesis of theatre, performance and dance, while also expressing the field of tension between ying and yang, male and female and their everlasting alteration.  In his Butoh workshops, Tadashi strived to not only teach students new forms to move but also to provide a deep view into Butoh philosophy.  

Yukio Suzuki, born 1972 in Shizuoka Japan, is a dancer and choreographer who represents Gen X Butoh and the Japanese contemporary dance scene.  In 1997, Yukio began studying Butoh and training in Butoh at the “Karada no Gakko” (School of the Body) of the the legendary Asbestos-kan, the original art studio of Butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata.  Yukio Suzuki has trained with numerous Japanese master Butoh teachers including Moe Yamamoto, Akira Kasai, Koichi Tamano, and Akiko Motofuji. Yukio studied Butoh with Ko Murobushi for 10 years and danced in many of his performances as a member of his company, Ko & Edge Co.

In the year 2000, Yukio founded his own dance company "YUKIO SUZUKI projects" in order to more widely present activities as a choreographer, performer and director. In 2003 he won the ST Spot Lab Award. In 2004 he participated in the final Next-Next program of the Saison Foundation. In 2007 he was nominated for the Kyoto Arts Center Performing Arts Award 2007. His artworks have won several important awards in Japan, in 2008 his work “Confronting Silence” won the Grand prix at the Toyota Choreography Awards as well as the  “Next Age: Choreographer of the Next Generation” prize.

Yukio Suzuki has performed in more than 40 cities around the world, including visits to France, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Riga-Latvia, Sibiu-Romania, Singapore, United States, England and India.  In recent years he has expanded his activities as a choreographer with projects like choreographing pieces for dancers of the Tokyo City Ballet Company and participating in the Asian Dance Conference.  Yukio continues to teach and perform internationally while embodying a strong physicality and dance performance that is flexible, sensitive, and attractive to local audiences.  

Sara Zalek is a Chicago-based performer, interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary artist, event producer, and curator of artistic situations and curious objects.  Rooted in physical investigations of trauma, resilience, and transformation, their work is intimate, raw, poetic.  They make performances into learning situations and sensing environments to encourage thoughtful interpersonal connections.

Zalek performs often in both live and online situations; The City of Chicago named them an Esteemed Artist in 2022. Elastic Arts Foundation awarded them a Curatorial Grant in 2020 for Hot Mess: A hybrid performance event. They were a Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist in 2015 and a 2017 3Arts Make a Wave Awardee.  They have performed and curated performances at the Chicago Cultural Center, High Concept Labs, Elastic Arts, Experimental Sound Studio, Links Hall, dfbrl8r, Urban Guild in Kyoto, Japan, and so many more.  For the past 20 years, Sara has studied Butoh and trained with numerous teachers including Yoshito Ohno, Yumiko Yoshioka, Tadashi Endo, Minako Seki, Yuko Kaseki, Mari Osanai, Koichi & Hiroko Tamano, Yukio Waguri, Ken Mai, Lori Ohtani, Yumi Umiumare, Diego Piñón, Atsushi Takenouchi, Ginger Krebs, Ayako Kato, and Michael Sakamoto. Sara is the founder of Butoh Curious, a Chicago-based group that connects national and international teaching artists with Chicago art makers across genres in the independent and fringe arenas (including dance, butoh, physical theater, experimental and improvisational music). They create opportunities for positive communication and arts integration using workshops, performances, and conversations about personal and collective body. More info at: https://butohchicago.com/

divinebrick is a Latinx performance artist and self iconoclast in search for the sacred primordial being.  The name “divinebrick” is a placeholder for an idea that the self is a divine phenomenon holding and care taking the grander whole. Decolonizing the self is the remembering of the soil the self is made of. The name “josie j” is the further erasure of the colonized self accepted for autonomy.  

After their fine art studies, josie j trained extensively in Butoh with Koichi Tamano and Hiroko Tamano, both disciples of Butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata.  While in San Francisco working with with the Tamanos, josie j also worked with Latino performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena, who works in a Psycho-Magic style.  josie j has also studied movement with Oguri located in Venice, California.  Oguri has served a greatly influential dancer in josie j’s style.  Gung Fu and Tai Chi practice are also foundational to josie j’s corporeal explorations. Josie j studied these Chinese ancient medicines with James Ibrao from 2013 until his passing in 2020. 

For more information about divinebrick/josie j’s artwork, workshops and performances visit: https://www.razethewhitebox.com/

Kota Yamazaki, born and raised in Niigata, Japan, was first introduced to Butoh under the teaching of Akira Kasai at Tenshi-kan at the age of 18.  Yamazaki graduated from Bunka Fashion College in Tokyo with a Bachelor of Arts in Fashion Design.  After his Butoh teacher Akira Kasai moved to Germany, Yamazaki continued his Butoh practice with Kunishi Kamiryo at Salamu-kan.  With an intention of expanding the field and possibilities of Butoh, Yamazaki started creating contemporary dance works in his 30’s with Tokyo-based dance company, rosy co.  With the invitation from Germain Acogny to create a dance piece in collaboration with her Senegal-based company Jant-bi, Yamazaki disbanded his Tokyo-based company, which he led from 1995-2001.  Since 2003, Yamazaki has been based in both New York and Tokyo, presenting dance works nationally and internationally.  From 2016-19, Yamazaki received artistic commissions from the Japan Contemporary Dance Network, New York Live Arts, and the Baryshnikov Arts Center in NY, to create a dance trilogy called the “Darkness Odyssey” that examined Butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata’s dance of darkness and its relation to Gilles Deluze’s philosophies.  During those years, Yamazaki continued to teach around the world, and he is a current Teaching Faculty member at Bennington College in Vermont.  Yamazaki has also served as the Director of the Whenever Wherever Festival, a Tokyo-based cross-disciplinary experimental dance festival since 2009.

Kota Yamazaki has received numerous awards for his work including a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Dance and Performance Award (also known as the Bessie Award), Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant Award (2013), and a 2016 New York Foundation for the Arts award for his work as founder and director of the FLUID HUG-HUG dance company, which integrates Butoh-based somatic practices, Japanese aesthetics, and Buddhist teachings such as “one equals many, many equals, one.”

Yuko Kaseki is a Japanese Butoh dancer, performer, improviser, choreographer and teacher based in Berlin, Germany. She studied performing arts at the Braunschweig University of Fine Arts and also trained with Anzu Furukawa of the legendary Japanese Butoh company DAIRAKUDAKAN. For many years, Yuko trained with Furukawa and danced in two of her companies: Dance Butter Tokio and Verwandlungsamt. Yuko moved to Berlin in 1995 and founded the company Cokaseki, which is still active to this day. Cokaseki is an ensemble for performative research around dance, visual arts and experimental music in live events and improvisations at theaters, galleries, site specific spaces, and film. Her strong interest in breaking the border of physical existence leads to projects with mixed ability artists and performers. Yuko's artwork incorporates the spirit of Butoh and also borrows from avant-garde Performance Art using physical objects, literary texts and experimental writings, and Live soundscapes.

Yuko has performed in Europe, the USA, Canada, Mexico, Uruguay, Argentina, Australia, Taiwan, Korea and Japan. She has collaborated with numerous international artists and companies, including inkBoat (San Francisco), CAVE (New York City), Antonis Anissegos (Berlin), Isak Immanuel/Tableau Stations (San Francisco) and Theater Thikwa (Berlin). Her performance “Ame to Ame” received the Isadora Duncan Dance Award in San Francisco for best ensemble performance; “Tooboe” was nominated for the Dora Mavor Moore Award in Toronto for outstanding production; and “Kudan” was nominated for the Toyota Choreography Award 2004 in Tokyo, Japan. For more info about Yuko’s work, visit: https://cokaseki.com

Jacquelyn Marie Shannon is a performance and ritual artist, choreographer and teacher heavily influenced by Butoh, avant-garde theater, spiritualism, and the nostalgic mythos and mysticism of the south. Since her introduction to Butoh in 2006, Jacquelyn is thankful to have studied under a variety of teachers, with particular gratitude to Anastazia Louise Aranaga and Diego Piñón, and has produced and performed both solo and ensemble-based work across the United States. Jacquelyn holds a Master's Degree from Indiana University where she studied Butoh and other expressive modalities through theories of affect, performance and visual and embodied poetics. Her current projects explore spaces of exchange between haunting, corporeality, magic and materiality through living installation, ritual and multi-media performance with an emphasis on the affective, precarious, poetic body.

Jacquelyn is currently a PhD Candidate in Theatre and Performance at City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center. Her research focuses on the hidden, unseen, or unspeakable, investigating instances in theatre and performance in which the evocation of unseen or supernatural forces do transformative social, cultural, and political work. She is especially interested in ghosts and haunting, spiritualism and seance, ceremonial magic and witchcraft, shamanic ritual, and neo-pagan, occult practices and performance. Jacquelyn continues to research Butoh as a poetic equipment for living, for manifesting radical possibility, and for personal and social transformation. https://jacquelynmarieshannon.com

Katsura Kan is a Butoh dancer and choreographer from Kyoto, Japan and among the ranks of Japan's senior generation of Butoh. In 1979, Kan began his career as a dancer with the seminal Butoh troupe Byakkosha, known for their theatrically explosive, provocative, and highly charged performance style. In 1985, Kan briefly worked with Butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata when Hijikata was invited to guest choreograph a performance that Kan was a part of. Kan left Byakkosha in 1981 to Launch and direct an international dance troupe called Katsura Kan & The Saltimbanques. His own multinational Butoh company, The Saltimbanques, has featured dancers from North America, Europe, Israel, Australia, and Thailand as well as Japan. For the last ten years, Kan has organized numerous academic Butoh conferences in Kyoto, and all over the world, for the next generation of Butoh. Kan was instrumental in launching the Kyoto International Butoh Festival and has continued to serve as a co-producer and curator of this global Butoh convergence in the historic city of Kyoto. Katsura Kan describes Butoh to be "based on the body as a costume and a Landscape which has the potential to recover, activate and revitalize humanity and the community."

Julie Becton Gillum has been creating, performing and teaching dance in the USA, Europe, Asia, Cuba and Mexico for over 40 years.  She has performed at international Butoh festivals and performance art festivals including San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Boulder, Seattle and Kolkata.  Since 2019, Julie has toured with Butoh Lantern, (butohlantern.com) throughout Europe and India.

Julie has received numerous grants and awards for her artwork, including the prestigious 2008-09 North Carolina Choreography Fellowship Award which she used to travel to Japan for continued training in Butoh, her primary form of artistic expression.  Julie has trained intensively with master Butoh artists including: Seisaku, Diego Piñón, Mari Osanai, the late Yoshito Ohno and the late Natsu Nakajima.

As the Founder and Artistic Director of the Asheville Butoh Festival, (FB: Asheville Butoh Collective), Gilum has collaborated with a wide variety of performers from all over the world and has hosted many artists throughout the 15 seasons of the festival including: Ken Mai, Yuko Kaseki, Yumiko Yoshioka, Itto Morito, Joan Laage, Vangeline, Nicole LeGette, Vanessa Skantze, Seisaku, Yuri Nagaoka and more. 

Anastazia Louise is a multimedia artist, teacher, costume designer, and performer that offers a personally developed movement style that combines a lifetime of performance experience.  Anastazia is the founder and artistic director of Bad Unkl Sista, a performance art ensemble that combines choreography, original and improvised music, couture costuming, and physical theater elements to produce site-specific durational performances that seek to provoke and inspire – changing how witnesses relate to the performers, to the world, and to themselves. Her approach emphasizes creative and proactive human development within our present-day social context, foregrounding the pathways of transcribing and uniting outer and inner landscapes into a physical expression to reach all witnesses on a personal level.  For the past three decades, she has continued to evolve her characteristically unique fusion of performance and costuming while performing and teaching Butoh-based presence techniques and collaborating on large-scale art installations.

Anastazia Louise was introduced to Butoh by Diego Piñón in 2002, and his teachings remain an ongoing inspiration for her performance work.  Other influences include Hiroko and Koichi Tamano, Sankai Juku, and Vangeline.  Anastazia has also had the privilege of collaborating with internationally recognized artists including Flam Chen, Beats Antique, SORNE, ill.GATES, Human Nature Dance Company, Totter Todd, Soriah, Stellamara, Mizu Desierto, Nathan Montgomery (Syzygy Butoh), Richochet, The L.A. Stilt Circus, and VerbaBola. Since 2002, Anastazia has produced hundreds of performances for local, regional, and international promoters and festivals.  Notable works include “First Breath – Last Breath", an opera-scale production that spawned two audio recordings and a documentary short film titled “The Space Between".  Anastazia also choreographed and performed in "Little Match Girl Passion", an adaptation of David Lang's Pulitzer Prize-winning work performed in both San Francisco and Denmark.

Sheri Brown is a performing artist and educator based in Seattle, Washington.  She is the Artistic Director of DAIPAN Butoh Collective and Co-Director of the Seattle International Butoh Festival.  With over 30 years of professional theater training, Sheri has studied with a wide range of Butoh master teachers including her most formative teachers: Katsura Kan, Diego Piñon, Joan Laage, and Yoshito Ohno in Japan, as well as with many stage theater artists of all types..

Since beginning her Butoh studies in the year 2000, Sheri has been invited to present a wide variety of Butoh artworks from theatrical stage performances to durational street performances in over a dozen cities throughout the United States, Mexico, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and South America.  Sheri’s choreography and teaching draws from Butoh, Japanese Noh, mathematics, metaphysics, shamanism, and earth-body imagery: a well of deconstructed and regenerative roots that energize the soul and offer a portal for transformation.  Sheri considers her work as a Butoh teaching artist a profound honor and compelling challenge, inseparable from her work as an unfolding human being.

For more information about Sheri’s work with DAIPANbutoh and their annual Seattle Butoh Festival, check out: https://www.daipanbutohcollective.com