Boston Butoh and Performing Arts Festival [04/24/25]

The Boston Butoh and Performance Art Festival will be presented at the Boston Center for the Arts’ Plaza Theater from Thursday, April 24th through Sunday April 27th, 2025. The program is co-produced by Mobius and the Boston Center for the Arts. We are excited to debut the program for our second annual festival which includes a free film screening, 2 evenings and 1 matinee of performance and a butoh workshop. This builds on the success of our inaugural festival in 2019 in which we presented headlining artists Yuko Kaseki and Zack Fuller in collaboration with Emily Smith and Michael Evans at the Green Street Studios in Cambridge. We are proud to provide Boston audiences with the rare opportunity to dive deeply into these enigmatic avant-garde performance forms.

Performer information:

Julie Andrée T.

PhD student in Arts Studies and Practices at the Université du Québec à Montreal (UQAM), Julie Andrée T. was awarded SSHRC and FRQSC grants in 2023 for her research project “L’Esthétique du dépaysage ou la défaillance du paysage” (Aesthetics of anti-lanscape or the Failure of Landscape). An exhibition curator, internationally recognized as an interdisciplinary artist, she worked from 2008 to 2011 at the School of Museum of Fine Arts in Boston as a guest professor in performance art. In 2020, in Saint-Siméon (Quebec), she co-founded the Inouï Exhibition Center whose mission is to promote contemporary art through heritage. A teacher at the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, she has been practicing performance for over 30 years. Her work has been seen at the Live Biennial in Liverpool (2010), the PUSH Festival in Vancouver (2011), the Festival d’Avignon (2010), the Festival Trans-Amériques in Montreal (2009, 2012), the Manif D’art 7 in more than 30 different countries and is a member of the performance group Black Market International.

Joan Laage/

Kogut Butoh

Photo by r.nihiline

Joan Laage studied under Kazuo and Yoshito Ohno and Yoko Ashikawa in Tokyo in the late 80s and performed with Ashikawa’s group Gnome, one of very few non-Japanese to have this extraordinary opportunity. Returning to the US, she settled in Seattle and directed Dappin’ Butoh from 1990-2001. She is a co-founder of DAIPANbutoh Collective, which produces an annual butoh festival. Joan has performed at many festivals including the first New York butoh festival and Vangeline’s Women Defining Butoh Festival, and at Vienna’s Hybrid Butoh Festival and Paris’ En Chair et en Son Acousmatic Festival in 2022. A Ph.D. from Texas Woman’s University, who wrote on the butoh body and Certified Movement Analyst (NYC), she is featured in Sondra Fraleigh’s books and in Tanya Calamoneri’s Butoh America. She creates site-specific work for Seattle Japanese gardens annually and tours Europe every year. She is an avid Tai Chi practitioner with a background in traditional Asian dance/theater and a professional gardener. Since living in Krakow 2004–2006, she has been known as Kogut (rooster). www.seattlebutoh-laage.com; https://www.facebook.com/joan.laage

Alejandra Herrera Silva

Photo by: someone

Alejandra Herrera Silva studied in the U. de Chile, Valencia, and Belfast and co-founded PERFOPUERTO. Her performance and installation explore her body and the biological implications that it bears as a social and political being. She is now exploring motherhood and the domestic. Her work has been showcased worldwide and recognized by FONDART and DIRACs.

Mitsu Salmon

Photo by: Ricardo Adame

Mitsu Salmon creates performance and visual works that fuse multiple disciplines. Her work starts with personal or familial stories and branches out to speak to contemporary issues such as diaspora, labor, and the environment. She was a member of the Butoh dance company Ima Tenko and Kiraza from 2008-2011 in Kyoto, Japan. Salmon received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014, and her undergrad degree from NYU. She has participated in artist residencies such as at Taipei Artist Village (Taiwan), Incheon Art Platform (Korea), and Guildhall (NY). She has presented work at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Indianapolis Museum of Art, and Steppenwolf Theater. She has received grants such as Midwest Nexus Touring Grant, Chicago Dancemaker’s Lab Grant, and Utah Performing Arts Fellowship. She is currently an assistant professor of theater at Brandeis University.

Sara Zalek

Photo by Mike Caldwell

Sara Zalek is a transdisciplinary artist, producer, curator of Butoh related situations, and other bodily curiosities. Rooted in physical investigations of trauma, resilience, and transformation, their work is intimate, raw, poetic. They make performances combining sound, movement, image and voice, host movement workshops, and dream of large sensing environments to encourage thoughtful interpersonal connections. Zalek performs very often in both live and online situations. They are a Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist (2015), a 3Arts Make a Wave Awardee (2017), and Ragdale Foundation Fellow (2017). The City of Chicago named them an Esteemed Artist in 2022 for a Curatorial Grant Project with Elastic Arts Foundation for Hot Mess! virtual/irl hybrid performance events. They have performed and curated performances at the Chicago Cultural Center, High Concept Labs, Chicago Parks District, Elastic Arts, Ragdale Foundation, Experimental Sound Studio, Links Hall, Lumpen Radio, dfbrl8r, Headwaters Theater (PDX), Philosophical Research Society (LA), Urban Guild in Kyoto, Japan, and many more. Through Butoh Curious Chi, Zalek connects national and international teaching artists with Chicago art makers across genres in the independent and fringe arenas including dance, butoh, physical theater, experimental and improvisational music. They create opportunities for positive communication and arts integration using workshops, performances, and conversations about personal and collective body.

Rosemary Candelario

Photo by Kazuo Yamashita

Rosemary Candelario is an artist-scholar specializing in butoh, which she has studied, taught, and performed across the United States and around the world. Her books and articles on butoh and butoh-related forms have been published in English and Japanese, and she was awarded the Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research in 2018. Recent choreographic works include aqueous (site version 2021, 2022, 2024, 2025), aqueous (stage version 2019), and 100 Ways to Kiss the Trees (2018). Rosemary is Associate Professor of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin. www.rosemarycandelario.net

Serena Gabriels

Photo by Patricia Palmer

Serena Gabriels is an interdisciplinary artist working in the Boston area. Her work explores the subjects of mental health awareness and play. Using her own lived experience with mental illness, she creates work that visualizes feelings that many cannot put into words. By combining video and the use of her body as a canvas, she brings invisible sensations to light. It is her intention to communicate compassion for these experiences and convey the message that we are not alone.Working at an elementary school, Serena engages her imagination daily to keep up with games of pretend and creativity. Through embracing her own wonder, she recognizes the importance of play for one's well being. She explores how to approach play as a “grown up”, with interactive performances and installations that engage the imaginative mind. Serena presented Primary Colors at the Midway gallery in the exhibition Register Disrupt Visionary in 2022. Working alongside Edward Monovich in his Dadabex series, she performed at Fog X Flow on the Emerald Necklace Conservancy in 2018. Her solo exhibition Mirror. was held at the Godine Gallery at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2019.

Live Musicians

MOONDRAWN

Philip Fryer

Phil Fryer is a Boston based performance, sound and installation artist. Informed by the writings and performances of John Cage, Philip Fryer explores experience through performance, sound, and installation. At times chaotic and other times serene, their work draws connections between mortality, chronic illness, and memory decay. Fryer often utilizes obsolete or forgotten technology, bringing together the past and the present.

Max Lord

Max Lord is a noisemaker from Massachusetts who records as Ghost Grass (ghostgrass.bandcamp.com) and makes collaborative live artwork as half of Lord and June (www.lordandjune.com). He is known for a long-term relationship with Buchla electronic instruments, as a performer and a technician.

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