2025 Salish Sea Butoh Festival

Workshop Teachers and Performing Artists

  • SAGA KOBAYASHI

    — Kuwana, JAPAN

  • SEISAKU

    — Tokyo, JAPAN

  • YURI NAGAOKA

    — Tokyo, JAPAN

  • YUMI UMIUMARE

    — Melbourne, AUSTRALIA

  • ROSEMARY CANDELARIO

    — AUSTIN, TEXAS

  • EUGENIA VARGAS

    — Mexico City, MEXICO

  • MELVIN COPPALLE

    — Rennes, FRANCE

  • JOAN LAAAGE / KOGUT BUTOH

    — SEATTLE, Washington

  • ESPARTACO MARTÍNEZ

    — Mexico City, MEXICO

Saga Kobayashi        

— from Kuwana, JAPAN

Born in 1946 in Mie Prefecture, Japan, SAGA KOBAYASHI is a world-renowned Butoh dancer, choreographer and teacher who is one of the last remaining 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 many of Hijikata’s most important productions from the end of the 1960’s to the early 1970’s, along with his other core Butoh dancers Yoko Ashikawa, Momoko Nimura, Koichi Tamano, 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.

Yumi Umiumare

— from Melbourne, Australia

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 with international collaborations, 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.

Seisaku

— from Tokyo, JAPAN

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 his teacher, 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 many times, visiting 10 different countries.  In 2025, he was invited to perform at 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

— from Tokyo, JAPAN

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 works as a group.  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, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mexico City, and New York City.

Espartaco Martínez

— from Mexico City

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.  Espartaco’s career journey is featured and chronicled in the book BUTOH AMERICA: Butoh Dance in the United States and Mexico from 1970 to the early 2000s.

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.

Rosemary Candelario

— from Austin, Texas

Rosemary Candelario is an Associate Professor of Performance as Public Practice in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin.  She makes dances engaged with Butoh, ecology, the outdoors, and site-related performance.  Her choreography has been produced across the United States and in Japan.  Rosemary creates both stage performance solo works 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, TX.

Rosemary is also a renowned Butoh scholar and academic researcher of Butoh.  She was awarded the 2018 Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research for her book Flowers Cracking Concrete: Eiko & Koma's Asian/American Choreographies and is the co-editor with Bruce Baird of The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance.  Her current project Butoh Ecologies: Dancing with Nature as Embodied Ecological Praxis is a multisite case study that uses Butoh dance training and Butoh performance to research embodied practices that address fundamental environmental issues such as climate change and interspecies interdependence.

Melvin Coppalle

— from Rennes, France

MELVIN COPPALLE is a dancer, performer, choreographer, and Butoh practitioner from Rennes, France.  Since 2017, Melvin has served as the artistic director and choreographer of Compagnie Izanami, a Butoh-inspired modern dance company that draws inspiration from expressionist forms as well as Butoh dance in the vein of Mary Wigman, Kazuo Ôno and Ilka Schönbein.  Melvin has collaborated with a wide variety of performing artists from diverse artistic disciplines including Butoh, theater, mime, contemporary dance, drag and cabaret, hip-hop, punk and experimental music.  Recent collaborations include dancing and touring with MANTRA, a progressive rock music group from France that focuses on immersive records and mystic live shows, as well as performing in cabaret shows with La D.R.A.G. (Direction Rigoureuse des Approximations Glamours).

Melvin has studied Butoh with numerous master teachers including Saga Kobayashi and Akaji Maro.  In 2019, Melvin traveled to Japan to train intensively in Butoh and perform at the Hijikata Birth Festival in Akita City.  His visit is featured and highlighted in the film Kamaitachi in The Show: A Butoh Documentary.  Since then, Melvin has continued to dance and perform Butoh with a variety of interdisciplinary collaborators in addition to teaching community Butoh workshops throughout northwest France.  In his workshops, Melvin aims to facilitate the discovery of unique approaches to movement for each student by exploring what makes our body vibrate, what makes us move without restraints.  It is then, stripped of as many bodily restrictions as possible, that we can deeply explore different notions such as mastery of physical gesture, introspection, and metamorphosis.

Eugenia Vargas

— from Mexico City

EUGENIA VARGAS is a dancer, choreographer, teacher, curator, and artistic researcher based in 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. 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 Japanese Butoh teachers in the world including the late Natsu Nakajima and the late Yukio Waguri.  Vargas has co-produced and 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 several 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.

Joan Laage / Kogut Butoh

— from Seattle, WA

JOAN LAAGE is a performer, choreographer and dance educator who is regarded the “Grandmother of Pacific Northwest Butoh.”  While living in Japan, Joan studied and trained with Butoh pioneer Yoko Ashikawa (the major disciple of Butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata) and with Butoh master Kazuo Ohno in Tokyo.  Joan is one of the few non-Japanese dancers to dance under Yoko Ashikawa and to perform in her legendary Butoh troupe, Gnome, in the 1980’s.  Joan holds a PhD in Dance and her pioneering PhD dissertation from Texas Woman’s University 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. 

Joan continues to performs internationally and tours Europe ever year.  She has been a featured artist at national and international Butoh festivals since the 1990’s including the New York Butoh Festival, the UCLA Butoh Symposium, Vienna’s Hybrid Butoh Festival in Austria, Tenri Butoh Festival and En Chair et En Son Acousmatic Festival in Paris France, the 2024 Amsterdam Butoh Festival and the 2024 Warsaw Butoh Festival in Poland.  Joan has also performs annually at the Seattle Butoh Festival and was a headliner artist at the inaugural Salish Sea Butoh Festival.

In addition to over 35 years of teaching and thousands of performances over the years, Joan is known as the Northwest Butoh pioneer and 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 artwork is highlighted in the award-winning books DANCING INTO DARKNESS: BUTOH, ZEN AND JAPAN and Butoh: Metamorphic Dance and Global Alchemy by Sondra Fraleigh as well as BUTH AMERICA: Butoh Dance in the United States and Mexico from 1970 to the early 2000s by dance scholar Tanya Calamoneri.