BUTOH WORKSHOP NATSU NAKAJIMA | OCTOBER 2017

Organized in collaboration with Butoh Channel Berlin

18 – 22 October | 10:00-14:00 | €190 early bird
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We are happy to announce the third European tour of Natsu Nakajima in Berlin, the Hague, and Barcelona. Natsu Nakajima (1943 Sakhalin, Japan) is one of the founding members of Butoh movement in Tokyo since the 1960s, and is one of its foremost pioneers abroad.

Workshop description
Combining Hijikata’s choreographic methods with the improvisation intelligence taught by Kazuo Ohno, as well as the long choreographic and performance expertise of Nakajima herself, this workshop will prepare you for sensitive improvisation work, choreographic aptitude, and performance integrity.  Natsu Nakajima will teach not only the physical techniques, but also the background of Butoh conceptions and ideas. Content:

  1. Physical Exercise 
    • General exercise
    • KATSUGEN activity (living vital force  activity) by Noguchi Method
    • body  &  vocalization
    • playing game
  2. Basic Butoh 
    • being nothing
    • walking
  3. Vocabulary (how to combine theatrical action & dancing movement)
    • rhythm (time) and space
  4. Various energy qualities
  5. Transformation
  6. Improvisation
  7. Butoh-fu  (Butoh Notation) from Hijikata’s work: how to use Butoh-fu and to combine with Hijikata’s method and Kazuo Ohno’s method.

About Natsu Nakajima
Natsu Nakajima (b. 1943 Sakhalin, Japan) has been one of the most prominent figures in Butoh dance since its foundation in Tokyo in the 1960s, and one of its foremost pioneers abroad. Training under both Hijikata Tatsumi and Kazuo Ohno, Nakajima went on to establish her own dance company, Muteki-sha, in 1969, with whom she has been performing and choreographing internationally since the early 1980s. Her highly acclaimed performance of ‘Niwa’ at LIFT ‘83 (London) marked the beginning of this international touring career, and led to performances at festivals such as FIND (Montreal), the Nancy Festival, and the Sydney Biennale. In addition to her performance and choreographic work, Nakajima has over thirty years of experience as a teacher, and has been one of the forerunners of dance for the disabled in Japan.

Ankoku Butoh (暗黒舞踏) – dance of darkness 
Hijikata Tatsumi, who passed away in 1986, is the originator of Ankoku Butoh; and Ohno Kazuo (1906-2010), an extraordinary and rare dancer, was his great collaborator. Hijikata was like Picasso; every season, he would change the style of his works like a chameleon. This partly explains why each of his disciples developed very different working styles. Natsu Nakajima was among the founding members of the Ankoku Butoh movement and belongs to the first generation.

Ankoku Butoh is a movement in the performing arts that was born riding on the wave of counter-culture in post-war Japan in 1950-1960s. Now in Europe, and some other countries, the term “Ankoku” has been dropped from “Ankoku Butoh”, and the term “Butoh” has become more closely associated with these countries. Losing “ankoku” has resulted in losing sight of the original ideology from when Ankoku Butoh was created and has given rise to many misunderstandings and misinterpretations.

Whatever you may call it, darkness, spirituality, or even something formless, something that cannot be put into words, or simply, the unconscious, the inexplicable, the destroyed and disappeared… …we are actually talking about something that cannot be seen. Something that Hijikata called “ankoku”. Hijikata liked to use the word “yami” (shadowy darkness). It gives the feeling of something that is full of contradiction and irrationality, somewhere like the “chaos of eternal beginning”… To deconstruct Ankoku Butoh with “language” is moving further and further away from the joy of early Ankoku Butoh’s integral quest for “the body as the scene of fulfilled life”.
(from the lecture of Natsu Nakajima)


 

Registration
Registration for 5-day Butoh workshop by Natsu Nakajima with an intensive training of 4 hours per day. The number of places is limited.

Early bird €190,- if registered before 1st of October
Late bird €210, if registered after 1st of October

Please register by mail to cloud.danslab@gmail.com
With Subject Title: Registration Butoh Workshop
Payment details will be provided and registration confirmed when payment received on CLOUD/Danslab bank account.