2024 Salish Sea Butoh Festival
Workshop Teachers
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TADASHI ENDO
—Göttingen, Germany
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YUKIO SUZUKI
— Tokyo, Japan
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josie j / divinebrick
— Los Angeles, California
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SARA ZALEK
— Chicago, Illinois
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Shoshana Green (GUEST PERFORMER)
— San Francisco, Californa
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Katinka Kleijn (GUEST PERFORMER)
— Cellist from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra
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Ginger Krebs (GUEST PERFORMER)
— Chicago, Illinois
Tadashi Endo
— Workshop August 13-15
TADASHI ENDO — born 1947 in Peking, China to Japanese parents — is a world-renowned Butoh-dancer, choreographer and Butoh teacher based in Göttingen, Germany. Tadashi is 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 also served as a guest professor 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 Butoh pioneer Kazuo Ohno who already then realized a deep relationship between Endo’s dance and Butoh. Since meeting Kazuo Ohno, Tadashi has been deeply influenced by his work.
In 2008, Tadashi was featured as a Butoh artist and 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 has 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 has also performed as a guest solo dancer.
In his Butoh artistry, Tadashi strives 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. His teaching focuses on Tadashi Endo’s Butoh-MA method which aims to make the invisible visible. ”Ma” is a Japanese aesthetic concept related to “emptiness” and “the space in-between.” It suggests an interval and a consciousness of place. In his Butoh workshops, Tadashi strives to not only teach students new forms to move but also tries to provide a deep view into Butoh philosophy.
Yukio Suzuki
— Workshop August 16-18
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, Akiko Motofuji, and the late Ko Murobushi. 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.
divinebrick / josie j
— Workshop August 12 & 19
"My practice is an exploration in phenomenon, an ancient practice that finds a wide scoop. Work generally includes sound, body, environment, and objects. Themes of work vary on specific needs. Some themes in the past have been initiation rites to a first time mother and a meditation on primordial growth. Currently I wish to explore what phenomena are involved with art making, making with sensitivity, finding questions in emerging technology." — divinebrick / josie j
Artist divinebrick (josie j) is an Indigenous 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. The Tamano’s are Berkeley-based Butoh Masters, once students of Butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata. While in San Francisco working with and training in Butoh 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 (a student of James Wing Woo and Ed Parker), from 2013 until his passing in 2020.
For the 2024 Salish Sea Butoh Festival, josie j will be teaching a workshop titled “Corporeal Reformation: Butoh Explorations and Body as Phenomenon.”
For more information about divinebrick/josie j’s artwork, workshops and performances visit:
Sara Zalek
— Workshop August 20
Sara Zalek is a Chicago-based transdisciplinary artist, performer, 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, Lumpen Radio, 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, Natsu Nakajima, Koichi & Hiroko Tamano, Yukio Waguri, Joan Laage, 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 here: https://butohchicago.com/
Shoshana Green
— Guest Performance on August 16th
Shoshana is a San Francisco-based Butoh artist, teacher, curator and presenter/producer for Butoh Programming in San Francisco. more info here: https://www.shoshanagreenart.com/butohsf
In addition to being a somatic psychotherapist with a Master’s degree in Somatic Psychology, Shoshana is an experimental artist using movement and image to study process, identity and relationships. She works with the body as a sculptural moving metaphor exploring non-verbal narratives that relate to quotidian, esoteric and sensorial content. Her work is inspired by the tradition of Japanese Butoh and she draws from her studies with renowned Butoh teachers, Vangeline, Diego Piñon, Katsura Kan, Semimaru-San (Sankai Juku), Natsu Nakajima, Akira Kasai, Tadashi Endo and Yumiko Yoshioka, Atsushi Takenouchi.
For the 2024 SALISH SEA BUTOH FESTIVAL, Shoshana will be performing a live piece titled "Exile" with 2024 Teaching Artist Sara Zalek.
Katinka Kleijn
— Special guest Musical Performer
Hailed by The New York Times as “a player of formidable expressive gifts,” Dutch-born cellist Katinka Kleijn enjoys a genre-defying, interdisciplinary career. Classically trained, she has cultivated an exploratory, interactive practice at the fertile intersection of improvisation, composition, performance art and collaboration. Much of Kleijn’s work illuminates the cello’s anthropomorphic qualities, often by placing the instrument in thought-provoking new contexts. In 2019, Kleijn and cellist Lia Kohl waded with 30 cellos in Chicago’s Eckhart Park Pool for their devised work Water On the Bridge. Kleijn’s The Body as a Variable Resistor (2021) similarly probes the parallels between human and cello bodies, expressed through a shared-circuit synth. RESIDUUM (2022), a collaboration with Aliya Ultan, pairs Kleijn’s cello with unexpected materials, like 400 feet of mylar or a dress made of soda cans. Her collaborations with composer Daniel Dehaan and the Chicago-based performance art duo Industry of the Ordinary resulted in the widely publicized Intelligence in the Human- Machine (2014), a duet between Kleijn’s cello and her own brainwaves which Time magazine called “a balancing act for Kleijn’s whole body.”
Kleijn presents many of her conceptual projects as co-constructions with the performer(s) or audience, as in her situation-based composition Forward Echo, for 11 improvisers (2019), presented at Big Ears Festival by Ensemble Dal Niente. Inspired by Civil War–era drum commands, it tasks two spatially separated ensembles with reacting in real time to each other’s rhythms. More recently, her silent video project Screenplay in 4 (2021) and her performance Conducted Vault, for Cellist, Synth and Vault (2022) explore touch as a vector for human connection and its new implications in pandemic-enforced solitude.
As a cellist, Kleijn is a company member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the International Contemporary Ensemble, as well as a Drag City recording artist, and she has worked with musicians like Bill MacKay, Ken Vandermark, Lia Kohl, Joe McPhee, Claire Chase and Mark Feldman. She performed solo multimedia presentations at the Library of Congress, North Carolina Performing Arts, and the Chicago Humanities Festival, and presented performance art at the Momentary Museum in Arkansas.
For the 2024 SALISH SEA BUTOH FESTIVAL, Katinka Kleijn will be performing Live cello soundscapes for the student workshop performances as well as Butoh Cabaret.
Ginger Krebs
— Guest Performance on August 16th
Ginger Krebs is a Chicago-based choreographer and performing artist that has been creating, performing and directing multi-disciplinary performance projects since 2005. Her work has been presented at The Arts Club of Chicago, the Chicago Artists Coalition, the Storefront Theater, and the Hyde Park Art Center, and the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA). She was awarded a MAP Fund grant for innovation in live performance in 2015, and her 2016 performance, Buffer Overrun, was chosen for the Chicago Tribune’s “Best Dance of 2016.” In recent years, she was awarded fellowehips from The Bogliasco Foundation in Genoa, Italy, Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California and an Artistic Residency at the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (MANCC), Florida State University.
Krebs holds a BA from The College of William & Mary, a BFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, and an MFA from The University of Illinois at Chicago. Krebs is an Adjunct Associate Professor in Performance and Contemporary Practices at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. more info at: www.gingerkrebs.com
Krebs makes objects and performances that address the vulnerability of bodies in the face of violence by remote or invisible actors, on the one hand, and the seductive mirages promoted by advertising, on the other. Her artwork celebrates people's creative responses to limitations, and marvels at the everyday heroism of human beings who to speak truth to power. For the 2024 SALISH SEA BUTOH FESTIVAL, Ginger Krebs will be performing a new solo piece on August 16th.