Butoh Encounters

OWN PRODUCTIONS:"The Last Supper" (26th August 2017), Losæter, OsloConcept and direction: Karolina Bieszczad-StieProducer: Food StudioDancers: Daisuke Yoshimoto, Megumi Wakasa

A chef is invited to compose a gourmet dinner. Daisuke Yoshimoto and Megumi Wakasa dance with the food during a seated performance in Losæter where audience are the guests of the two hosts. The venue dissolves into Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last supper” images filled with taste, smell, memory and gestures. The Last Supper is a spectacle that enriches ephemeral and sensual experience of dining. In this experimental concept eating becomes much more than a physiological need and dinning becomes much more than eating food. Haute cuisine is brought into life, while the dancers celebrate textures, flavours, scents and colours, craftily combined by a chef. The chef and the dancers are equal creators of the event. This intriguing, yet non intrusive performance is a visual and somatic food narration.

Menu:

First Course: King crab, onions, berries

(Allergens: King crab)

Main Course: Brisket, Tomato, Burnt Salad

(Allergens: Butter)

Dessert: Apples, vanilla, cream, caramel

(Allergens: Butter, cream)

"New You - New Me" (24th August 2017), 1857, OsloConcept: Karolina Bieszczad-Stie
Fashion designers: HAiKw/Dancers: Daisuke Yoshimoto, Megumi Wakasa, Azumaru, Kristin Nango, Margrette SlettebøMusic: Bendik BaksåsLight design: Stein Stie

New You - New Me challenges both fashion and dance world by combining the two fields into a unique performative event. HAiKw/’s clothing collection transforms the language of trend forecasting into the trends themselves as it manipulates the found rhetoric of industry reports and fashion house press releases into clairvoyant prints of pinstripes and wavy lines. The printed constellations throw industry cant into a universe of oral patterns, watermarks, and colour swatches. The collection then overlays these prints onto the corporeal methodology and contorted aesthetics of Butoh. The idea of Butoh, as well as a hands-on collaboration with the Butoh Encounters platform, works to inspire the family of knots, twists, diagonals, and inversions. This range of apparel becomes a new architecture for Butoh dancers’ bodies when they present the collection in an interactive way for the audience. The dancers are transformed by the garments and at the same time they transform the garments through their body work. Designed clothing are not costumes or props but become inseparable unity with dancers in the process of metamorphosis. Together, they produce their own stage life, autonomic, not referring to a fictional dramatic plot. The result is a dance/fashion show that is at once mischievous, experimental, absurd, and self-reflective.

"Multiverse" (3rd November 2018), Tårnet Kulturarena, OsloDirector and producer: Karolina Bieszczad-Stie
Producer: Sophie BarthDancers: Yoshito Ohno, Daisuke Yoshimoto, Saga KobayashiCinematography & light design: Stein StieDigital artist: Damien SerbanMusic: Simen Korsmo RobertsenTechnical design: Anders Nybø

...memories of the past, archived for the future...

Butoh Encounters presents a holographic performance Multiverse featuring legendary Butoh dancers: Yoshito Ohno (80)*, Daisuke Yoshimoto (77) and Saga Kobayashi (72). Due to their age, it is no longer easy or possible for them to perform in Europe, hence we bring them to Norway in a form of digital ghosts. By using modern technology we let them dance in one of the most exciting new venues in Oslo - Tårnet Kulturarena. We get an exclusive access to this 11 floors concrete tower before it is rented out to various artists. The event is accompanied by the live performance of an Oslo-based Japanese Butoh dancer Azumaru. 

Multiverse blends Butoh, music and technology into a mystic event, which celebrates nostalgia of the vanishing dance in a digital context.

*Yoshito Ohno passed away on 8th January 2020 at the age of 81. 

"The Butoh Book" (2019), KHiO, OsloConcept and design: Karolina Bieszczad-Stie
Design: Anna Roza GurowskaContributors: Atsushi Takenouchi, Azumaru, Dai Matsuoka (Sankai Juku), Daisuke Yoshimoto, Ima Tenko, Ken Mai, Mushimaru Fujieda, Saga Kobayashi, Tatsumi Hijikata Archives, Yumiko Yoshioka.

For many dancers Butoh is more than just a dance form. It is sometimes a concept, a wider form of art or a certain way of thinking about life, death and the world. There is no one way of understanding Butoh. The Butoh Book is a scrapbook which “translates” the body movement into a physical object. Most prominent Japanese Butoh dancers and Butoh institutions have been invited to contribute to the project. They are given space of an A3 size paper to create something that IS Butoh for them. It can be a collage of costume pieces, dance notations, drawings, part of music notes, found objects… All A3 papers are collected and bound into The Butoh Book. This is an artefact available for exhibitions (University of Oslo is the first destination). 

The Butoh Book is a trans-disciplinary project with the aim to explore origins of Butoh in a new way. 

SOURCE:

E-mail, Karolina Bieszczad-Stie, 16.05.2020