This will be a journey into the self and community via movement, writing, and art. No dance or movement experience of any kind is needed. Come as you are. This will be my second intensive offering at my home studio here in Columbus, Ohio at Heartfelt Yoga. (And we’re in the heart of all things arts and food and there are so many options for places to stay if you’re coming from out of town.)
The Basics
Dates: Friday, August 1st through Sunday August 3rd
Times:
Friday: 6 PM to 8 PM
Saturday: 10 AM to 6 PM (with one hour for you to get some lunch)
Sunday: 10 AM to 2 PM (with just a snack break)
And don’t worry: You won’t be sweating your butt off for all of those hours. There will be a good blend of moving and not moving based explorations.
Cost: $299
What you should bring
Your beautiful self
Comfortable clothing for moving and layering
A favorite blanket (or use one of the studio’s)
You do NOT need a yoga mat
Pen and journal
Water bottle
Snacks
Anything like a favorite crystal, plushie, mala, statue that will support your time with us
What is this all about?
Butoh is one of the fundamental pillars of Peony Somatic Dance, and during this intensive, we’ll be diving into it much more deeply than we can during a once a week class. We’ll also be playing with and blending in the principles of haiku and origami to explore a more expansive vocabulary to support the body and its expressions.
Butoh
Butoh is as vast as the universe in terms of approaches, and for every practitioner and for every choreographer of Butoh, there is a unique Butoh. (It’s almost impossible not to sound like some koan spewing zen monk when you speak of Butoh.)
For a little taste, here are some quotes:
“Butoh belongs both to life and death. It is a realization of the distance between a human being and the unknown. It also represents man’s struggle to overcome the distance between himself and the material world. Butoh dancers bodies are like a cup filled to overflowing, one which cannot take one more drop of liquid- the body enters into a perfect state of balance.” (Ushio Amagatsu)
“Movement alone does not become dance — the requirement for the dance is that one feeds such things as one’s own dreams, memories, and desire into the movement.” (Masaki Iwana)
"Butoh was conceived as an art that would continue to rebel, even to rebel against itself… it was conceived as an art that would not become an institutionalized form, but rather remain alive and vital, continuously reinvented by innovators inspired by it." (Maureen Fleming) (She is my main mentor in Butoh)
HAIKU
A lot of what is presented as haiku in the world is just short poetry. There are some aspects of haiku that many are missing and that are crucial.
Side story: for many seasons, I kept a haiku journal, writing every single day, and it was one of the key components for me of recovering from life threatening depression.
We will be using haiku to create movement, to feed ideas and dreams into our bodies, and we will be creating some original haiku.
Origami
We will play with origami in order to understand the idea of folding and refolding and unfolding in our own bodies. We’ll apply that individually in our movement but also in pairs and in the larger group.
If you have any questions about the workshop, please get in touch with me!