Northwest Butoh Festival LLC

Yumiko Yoshioka workshop and performance

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  Yumiko Yoshioka - 100 Light Years of Solitude

• Yumiko Performance Tickets

• Yumiko Workshop Tickets

Yumiko Yoshioka will teach an intensive series of workshops August 4th - 7th and will perform her work “100 Light Years of Solitude” on Saturday the 8th at 8:00 pm at New Expressive Works, 810 SE Belmont St., in Portland. Tickets on sale Spring 2026 via the N.E.W. website."100 Light Years of Solitude" by Yumiko YoshiokaFollowing Yumiko's acclaimed solo Before the Dawn, this is the second part of her trilogy From 1 to 100.Inspired by Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude to explore a state of solitude Yumiko dances the life of a unique creature, born on a planet 100 light years away from ours. Imagining that this creature is the only one of its species on that planet, it enjoys unfolding its life until it realizes its destiny... to exist in solitude.Yumiko says, "In my childhood, I was always fascinated by the imaginary creatures and monsters of fairy tales. Butoh, a dance of metamorphosis, helps me to explore this imaginary world, and make something invisible visible."

• Dancers

The Northwest Butoh Festival was May 13 - 16, 2026 at New Expressive Works (810 SE Belmont St.) in Portland, Oregon. There was twelve performances over three nights, 14 -16, and four workshops on the 13 -16.Performers included Joan Laage/Kogut Butoh, Julie Becton Gillum, Minja Mertanen, Vanessa Skantze, Iván Espinosa and Co, Ash Pillar, Arlo King, Amapola, Salty Xi Jie Ng, Olga Kravtsova, Monel Chang and Didi (Freddi) Wyss.Workshop teachers were Minja Mertanen, Vanessa Skantze, Julie Becton Gillum and Joan Laage.Performance ScheduleThursday May 14th at 8:00pm
1. Minja Mertanen
2. Didi (Freddi) Wyss
3. Arlo King
4. Vanessa SkantzeFriday May 15th at 8:00pm
1. Olga Kravtsova
2. Monel Chang
3. Bowels of the Earth by Ivân Espinosa and Co
4. Joan Laage/Kogut ButohSaturday May 16th at 8:00pm
1. Amapola
2. Ash Pillar
3. Salty Xi Jie Ng
4. Julie Becton Gillum

Program notes:Thursday May 14th starting at 8:00pm - New Expressive Works, 810 SE BelmontMINJA MERTANEN“Luvia”Music by Tatu Rönkkö.My solo is an exploration about the bones. It is the first part of a bigger group performance called ”Withering and Death” premiered in Finland last December. One inspiration for my solo is a part of the 15'th poem from Kalevala, a Finnish national epic. It has been translated also to English but is here in its original form not to lose the onomatopoesis of the poem:”Kusta luu luhoksi mennyt,
Siihen luuta luikahuta.
Kusta liikunna lihoa,
siihen liittele lihoa.
Sijallensa siunaele,
asemallensa aseta.
Luu luuhun, liha liha’an,
jäsenet jäsenihinsä.”Minja Mertanen (1981) is a Helsinki-based dancer and performance artist. She has graduated as a dance teacher, movement and dance therapist, yoga instructor, and somatic movement therapist. She has worked with butoh for over 20 years, performing and teaching in 20 countries. She is the founder of the Be(a)ware Butoh Festival in Helsinki and co-director of the Why Butoh Festival in Turku.DID (FREDDI) WYSS"Duration is a Stone*duration
it is a stone
it is a fact
it does not move
it has no place into which it could move
it has no place to move out of
it is a stone
it is a fact
it is a stone on which water has dropped
it is a fact
it is hard
it is smooth
the water does not wear it away
it wears the water away
it is a fact
it does not mean anything
it cannot tell time
-David AntinDidi is a queer, non-binary, time-based artist who examines the spaces of communication development and breakdown in connection with social structures and identity. They currently work under the moniker warm canopy, producing immersive soundscapes and performances, channeling plunderphonic mentalities and gathering ephemeral charges to release in static bursts.ARLO SAGE KING"To drown with a Selkie”Soundscape includes Dùsgadgh/Waking by Brighde Chaimbeul + field recordings.Spilling in our golden castle Skin seeking skin like fire in the yard. Yellowed crab grass burns with rhododendron A fever put out with rusted tools and rotted paper. I bend myself into a knot and we become a burl growing deep within an alder tree. Take it out one cannot wail underwater.Bad love cuts so gentle take my hand, take my eye, Wordly Lion That one walked off a cliff for you again and again i have lost my coat or maybe i shed it or destroyed it, i can no longer tell ( up and down are so similar in the sea ) Salt stings where soft once was, Selkie whispers to the undertow
“Kind mouth receive me”Arlo Sage King is a choreographer, theatre maker, and visual artist. Their work is guided by material exploration and deep somatic disembodiment, digestion, and re embodiment. Arlo creates through the lenses of Butoh, post modern dance, wearables, drag, and installation art.VANESSA SKANTZE“The Inscription of Memory”Live sound: Nolan Ashley, electronics Matt Hannafin, percussionWatching one's land and beloved creatures torn apart, taken away. Love embracing memory and inscribing it into skin, bone, tissue. Remembered forms invoked to continue the struggle; to dance, to intone their being- their essence. They are never forgotten, and their marauders never forgiven.Based in Seattle, Vanessa is a co-founder of Teatro de la Psychomachia, a DIY space which has hosted national and international performing artists and musicians since 2010. Vanessa became a student of Jinen Butoh founder Atsushi Takenouchi in 2003. She has trained extensively with Mari Osanai, and drawn deep from workshops with Natsu Nakajima, Seisaku, and Yuko Kaseki. She has created numerous solo and group butoh works and has taught regularly for 20 years.Friday May 15th starting at 8:00pm - New Expressive Works, 810 SE BelmontOLGA KRAVTSOVA"Passage"Jason Okamoto, live musicThis work draws from death rituals I grew up around, where the body is prepared and carried out of the house. We approach these practices as functional systems that organize action and time.This moment of transfer is connected to migration and shifts in a sense of self that are not visibly marked. The work is inspired by preparation and passage, where something becomes worn down and tattered, still holding connection to what came before, and where time and space are crossed through physical process.
This piece is part of the ongoing work The Place I’ve Never Been, premiering this fall.Olga Kravtsova (she/her) is a movement director and performer working at the edge of physical theater and sensory design. Drawing on archetype, folk lineage, and a neurodivergent sense of time, she builds high-attention worlds where story is felt before it’s named. Her work blends body, light, and sound with tactile materials—clay, cloth, and simple objects—treating the environment as an active collaborator, and inviting audiences into an undercurrent that wakes archetypal memory before words return.MONEL CHANG"Untitled"
Live music by Joe Kye.How can a body find liberation when it is weighted by a century of unspoken things? When a Korean body engages with the Japanese tradition of Butoh, a complex dialogue begins. While Butoh focuses on the "body that has been robbed," Han focuses on the "spirit that refuses to break despite being crushed." Monel Chang explores the ancestral topography of Han—the deep-seated Korean knot of sorrow, silent endurance, and unavenged injustice. Through the minimalist, visceral language of Butoh, the body becomes a vessel for the ghosts of a peninsula, navigating the friction between the Japanese "dance of the ash" and the Korean "fire of the heart."This is not a performance of victimhood, but a ritual of Jeong (affection) and Han—a transformation of agonizing silence into a landscape of white light and dark soil.Monel Chang (all pronouns, Corean) is a PWN based naturopathic physician, butoh dancer, somatic researcher, and performance artist. She most recently completed the performance residency at Shaking the Tree Theater with a solo show called "Take Me To Your Leader: the Seoul of a Clown" and is the current artist-in-residence at Coho Theater.IVÁN ESPINOSA AND CO.“Bowels of the Earth”Soundscape composed by Christopher Arnett featuring "Mishima" by Philip Glass.
Dancers: Iván Espinosa, Stefan Bach, Corin Wiggins, Arlo Sage King and Harlan Rosen.Bowels of the Earth is a meditation on the human body’s connection to decay and decomposition. The choreography takes its inspiration from a text by the founder of Butoh Tatsumi Hijikata titled “Suijakutai no saishū” that was delivered as a lecture by Hijikata at the 1985 Tokyo Butoh Festival. In his lecture, Hijikata emphasized the body’s intimacy with ecological forces like wind, mud, and soil, and how the embodiment of "suijakutai" (the weakening/decaying body) in Butoh excavates the relationship between life and death. Espinosa's choreography engages thematically with Hijikata’s concepts of corporeality and decay in the context of 21st-century ecological crises. In its descent towards the mud and the earth, Butoh invites us to commune with the forces of nature. In the words of Hijikata: "the dancer, through the Butoh spirit, confronts the origins of his fears: a dance which crawls towards the bowels of the earth."IVAN-DANIEL ESPINOSA is a Latino choreographer that creates interdisciplinary artwork engaged with ecology, climate change, and Japanese Butoh. He is a current PhD Candidate in Theatre and Performance Studies and he also holds a Master of Arts in Performance Studies from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Iván-Daniel’s choreographies are highly influenced by his extensive studies of Butoh. Since 2013, Iván-Daniel has trained with numerous Japanese master teachers from the lineage of Tatsumi Hijikata including Natsu Nakajima, Saga Kobayashi, Koichi and Hiroko Tamano, and Moe Yamamoto of Kanazawa Butoh-Kan. Iván-Daniel began his formative Butoh training in Seattle with Northwest Butoh pioneer Joan Laage, who continues to serve as his foremost teacher to this day. He is deeply grateful to Joan Laage for providing him with a continuous stream of inspiration. Iván-Daniel is the Executive Producer of the SALISH SEA BUTOH Festival, an annual dance festival that takes place on the Olympic Peninsula to deepen the study of Butoh with artists from all over the world.JOAN LAAGE/KOGUT BUTOH“Black Widow”Music by Steven Miller.Black Widow was first created and performed at The Pound Gallery in Seattle in the 1990s with music by Small Cruel Party and is inspired by black widow spiders, the devouring of the male post copulation, the merry widow corset and such imagery. After this initial performance, Joan commissioned Steven Miller to create a sound score. She has resurrected it several times through the years: for the Seattle International Butoh Festival, the first New York Butoh Festival in 2000, the UCLA Butoh Symposium in 2011 and at a Symposium featuring Saga Kobayashi at the University of Colorado in 2026.Steven Miller spent the '90s working as a touring musician in the industrial band ¡TchKung! and as a graphic designer, writer, and photographer for well-known Seattle publications and multiple ad agencies. For years he’s been better known for being a fine art photographer and videographer with his artwork shown in galleries and museums internationally, and photographs published in magazines and books around the world.Joan’s butoh practice and art are influenced by Kazuo Ohno, Yoshito Ohno, Yoko Ashikawa in Tokyo, Atsushi Takenouchi JINEN Butoh in Europe and Joan’s background as a Tai Chi practitioner and professional gardener.Saturday May 16th starting at 8:00pm - New Expressive Works, 810 SE BelmontAMAPOLA"Ghost Forest"Live music by Andrew Anderson.An improvised OFFERING and Collaborative Exploration with Portland Musician Andrew Anderson.AmaPola is a multidisciplinary, installation and performance theatre artist.
AmaPola uses the power of story, mythological imagery and ritual to portray our most intimate and grotesque nature.ASH PILLAR“Untide”Dancers: Carl Annala, paula helen, Joe McLaughlin, Tess Vanderkin, Nicole Walters and Amy Ward. Music composed and performed live by Andrew Anderson within the creative process of Ash Pillar.The choreography of Untide comes from group improvisation and play congealed into performance.
Ash Pillar has danced together since 2016.SALTY XI JIE NG“terminal eros”Live music by Shawn Creeden.eros: “the sum of life-preserving instincts that are manifested as impulses to gratify basic needs, as sublimated impulses”.About to step through the veil between life and death, a crone spots a phallus, awakening palpable desire and simple innocence from a moth-like, aged body.Salty Xi Jie Ng is an artist, educator, and akashic records practitioner based between Singapore and Turtle Island. Serving an enchanted process guided by the noumenal and divinatory, her transdisciplinary practice is a collaborative, alchemical site tending to the erotic, ancestry, end-of-life, dream imaginaries, and relationships with the spirit world. She has performed at Goethe-Institut Singapore, Singapore Art Museum, Shedhalle (Zurich), Taipei Artist Village (Taiwan), Mi Hak Gwan (Korea), as well as the 2nd PDX International Butoh Fest. Salty is the 2024 recipient of the Chamberlain Award for social practice artists and a proud member of the Singapore Butoh Collective.JULIE BECTON GILLUM“DUSK, the Darkening World”Music: Sabine SangitarThe wall featured in "DUSK..." symbolizes resistance, overcoming obstacles, and breakthroughs. Walls provide safety and authority, defend borders, and offer stability for communities. They can deter smuggling and human trafficking. However, walls can also divide communities and isolate individuals, impeding the movement of refugees and contributing to humanitarian crises. Additionally, they may harm ecosystems by disrupting wildlife migration, altering water flow, and leading to significant climate and temperature changes.DUSK originated from an improvisation involving a wall. Imagery evolved as the dance continued. The Western Wall in Jerusalem represents the founding of three major religious groups that have been in conflict for thousands of years. The controversial border wall between the US and Mexico remains a contentious issue. The wall dividing Berlin was finally taken down in 1989. The Great Wall of China and Hadrian’s Wall were both built to keep out raiders and invaders.Consider the numerous human hands that have come into contact with these walls - those that constructed it, meticulously selecting and placing each stone. Ancient walls, deemed sacred, have been touched with reverence throughout countless centuries. Prayers, spanning over immeasurable time, have been softly whispered and imprinted into the wall's crevices. Over time, their very essence seeps out, bursting forth like projectiles - whether in the form of arrows, stones, or bullets. The wall has become a canvas, bearing witness to the firing squad's executions, the warm blood and tissue splattered against its surface. The DNA absorbed into the wall has since become the very foundation of stories, myths, and legends.Julie Becton Gillum, artistic director of the 14-year-running Asheville Butoh Festival, has been creating, performing, and teaching dance in the US, Europe, Asia, and Mexico for over 40 years. She has practiced butoh for 27 years. Gillum was awarded the 2008-09 North Carolina Choreography Fellowship and used the funds to travel to Japan to study Butoh.

NWBF 2026 Festival Sponsors:

Butoh Workshops With Carl Annala

“I began studying Butoh dance in the mid 90’s after having seen the inspirational dance film Butoh: The Dance of Darkness at an early screening in the late 80’s. My approach is inspired by nature, the dark terroir of the pacific northwest, the sea, the forest, its creatures and conditions. I also pull from my background as a visual artist/teacher and bandleader. My Butoh learning lineage comes from both streams, Hijikata and Ohno. My lighthouse teachers, Yumiko Yoshioka and Seisaku, however, are in the Hijikata camp.”Carl will lead 2 hour workshops on the first/second Sundays of the month beginning in January at New Expressive Works, 810 SE Belmont St., in Portland. Reserve your space at [email protected] - drop-ins also welcome, no experience necessary. Sliding. Classes on Sundays at 1:00-3:00pm are on 2/8, 3/1, 4/5, 5/3 and 6/7.

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