ButohOUT! Festival: Six Week Workshop and Laboratory

Tuesday 27 February 2018 - Wednesday 04 April 2018

Over six weeks, participants will work with renowned Butoh practitioner Yumi Umiumare and Asian Shamanistic trance dance practitioner Tony Yap to learn their uncommon methods of performance making. Exploring themes of nature and the body, participants will be mentored to create original solo and group works.

Butoh, called ‘Dance of Darkness’, can be subversive and esoteric, and Yumi and Tony will run workshops for participants to be able to access their own distinctive movements. This workshop will reconnect participants to their body as their ‘closest nature’, working in various spaces throughout Abbotsford Convent. Through two forms of dance, Butoh and Trance, participants will explore their own idiosyncratic and creative expression. Exploring through their body notions of presence, emptiness, space and gravity, participants will be guided to return to a basic understanding of embodiment of nature in dance.

“The most mysterious and last nature we encounter is our body.” – Keiichi Ueda

Offered as part of the inaugural ‘ButohOUT!’ Festival, the laboratory process will be facilitated twice a week and will culminate with participants creating short works, to be presented at Abbotsford Convent during the ‘ButohOUT!’ Festival Performance season from 12 – 22 April 2018.

This workshop is being held at the Convent as part of the ‘ButohOUT!’ Festival, presented by renowned Japanese Australian performance artist Yumi Umiumare and Takashi Takiguchi, in partnership with the Abbotsford Convent Foundation (ACF) ‘ButohOUT!’ brings butoh, a Japanese theatre and dance form, into the context of Australia’s landscape, culture and history, through a series of workshops, performances and a public forum.

Notes:

  • Time commitment: 12 sessions, total of 36 hours plus rehearsal
  • No dance background is required to take part in this workshop
  • Participation in the performance of short works is strongly encouraged but is not compulsory
  • A package is available to combine the Six Week Workshop and the Weekend Intensive Workshop: Waged: $650 | Unwaged: $600
  • Payment plans are available for this workshop.

Other ‘ButohOUT!’ Festival programs at the Abbotsford Convent:

Artists

Yumi Umiumare 
Born in Hyogo, Japan, Yumi is the only Japanese Butoh Dancer in Australia and the creator of original Butoh Cabaret works. Originally a member of the seminal Butoh Company DaiRakudakan in Tokyo, she came to Australia to perform at the Melbourne International Festival in 1991.Yumi has been creating and teaching her distinctive style of works over the last 20 years and her works have received critical acclaim and garnered her and her collaborators several Australian Green Room awards.Yumi’s works are renowned for provoking visceral emotions, cultural identities with humor and they have been seen in numerous festivals in dance, theatre and film productions throughout Australia, Japan, East and West Europe, New Zealand and South East Asia. Through her diverse skills and unique aesthetics as a choreographer, she has also extensively worked in socially engaged theatre productions with aboriginal communities, culturally diverse communities and ESL groups, women from the sex industry and also people who has recovered from gambling addictions.

Yumi is a recipient of the fellowship from Australian Council (2015-16) for her PopUp Tearoom Series, and the recent winner of the Green Room Awards of Geoffrey Milne Memorial Award for her contribution to Contemporary and Experimental Performance.

Tony Yap
Born in Malaysia, an accomplished dancer, director, choreographer and visual artist. He is committed to the exploration and creation of an individual dance theatre language that is informed by psychophysical research, Asian shamanistic trance dance, Butoh, vocal extensions.  He has developed a dance praxis inducing trance to basic vocabulary of body poetics that includes pathways towards transparency and an autoschediastic space. Tony has received numerous nominations and awards including The Decay of the Angel; which won him a Green Room Award for Best Male Dancer. He has been a leading figure in inter-cultural discourse and received Asialink residential grants to work in Indonesia in 2005 and 2008, and a dance fellowship from the Australia Council for the Arts. Tony is the creative director of Melaka Arts and Performance Festival.

Supported by the City of Yarra.

Location & Contacts

Abbotsford

Date and time:
6PM - 9PM
Tuesday 27 February 2018 - Wednesday 04 April 2018


Address:
1 St Heliers Street