ButohOUT! Festival: Weekend Intensive Workshop

Friday 23 March 2018 - Sunday 25 March 2018

Yumi Umiumare. Photo by Vicki Shayen.

Explore Butoh in this intensive weekend workshop as part of the ‘ButohOUT! Festival’. Work with renowned practitioner Yumi Umiumare, the only Japanese Butoh Dancer in Australia, exploring performance making and experimenting with her unique ‘Butoh Cabaret’ methods including characterisation, provocation, and transformation.

Using what Yumi describes as ‘Body-Specific’ styles, she leads workshop participants to stimulate and search for their own unique and ‘authentic’ movements, working through images, narrative and abstraction. Exploring mundane gestures, daily objects, metaphor, and element of rituals, participants will be mentored by Yumi to find their own authentic movements and forms, creating a short work emerging from their personal focus and the poetry of their movements.

“Western dance begins with its feet firmly planted on the ground whereas Butoh begins with a dance wherein the dancer tries in vain to find his feet”

– Tatsumi Hijikata, the founder of Butoh

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

ButohOUT! Festival: PEEK-A- BUTOH! Children and Families Workshop: 23 – 25 March 2018

One Day Workshop with Agung Gunawan: 20 April 2018

‘ButohOUT!’ Performance Season and Public Forum: 12 – 22 April 2018

This workshop is being held at the Abbotsford 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: No dance background is required to take part in this workshop. Time commitment: 15 hours
  • A package is available to combine the Six Week Workshop and the Weekend Intensive Workshop: Waged: $650 | Unwaged: $600.

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 humour 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 theater productions with aboriginal communities, culturally diverse communities and ESL groups, women from the sex industry and also people who has recovered from gambling addictions. She has run workshops around the globe including Germany, Italy, Denmark, Japan, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Colombia. 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.

Supported by the City of Yarra.

Abbotsford Convent, Oratory, Sacred Heart Building

Abbotsford

Date and time:
Various times
Friday 23 March 2018 - Sunday 25 March 2018


Address:
1 St Heliers Street