We begin training with concentration to still our minds, to prepare, but finally our aim is to let it move into allowing our dance to be what emerges. This way we have the raw immediately lived truth of our being on stage.
Monthly Archives: September 2012
Seattle Butoh Festival WAVE III
DAIPANbutoh Collective presents Seattle Butoh Festival Oct 22- 28 Workshops, performances, and artist talk. Check it out at daipanbutoh.com or Facebook
Who Am I?
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This simple yet profound question, “Who Am I?” can then reveal one’s self not to be the endless tyranny of the ego-personality, but objectless Freedom of Being- Primordial Consciousness in which all states and all objects come and go as manifestatons of the Eternal Unborn Self that YOU ARE. Adyashanti
Why Don’t We Do It At The Fringe
“Higher Ground” Butoh Dance Theater By Helen Thorsen
With dancers: Mary Cutrera, Briana Jones, Lin Lucas, Alan Sutherland
Thursday Sept 20th 6:00 pm
Friday & Saturday Sept 21st & 22nd at 7:30 pm
Sunday Sept 23rd 5:00 pm
This dance takes a penetrating look at mental illness in contemporary society. Higher Ground the dance explores the struggle to maintain control in the face of madness, and the humanness and vulnerability of a soul coming to grips with their own unraveling. The inspiration for the work comes from the documentary “The Library of Dust” based on photographer David Masiel’s photos of the Oregon State Mental Hospital. Masiel’s photos document the decay of the hospital and the 3500 copper canisters which hold the remains of residents of the mental hospital who were unwanted in life and in death. The dance honors the journey for wholeness, and explores the interior life of our most vulnerable, and the resilience of our human spirit, and the courage to go on in the face of adversity.
Fringing soon
Thorsen’s“Higher Ground” takes a penetrating look at mental illness in contemporary society. This work is a butoh performance for 5 dancers. the dance explores the struggle to maintain control in the face of madness, and the humanness and vulnerability of a soul coming to grips with their own unraveling. The inspiration for the work comes from the documentary “The Library of Dust” based on photographer David Masiel’s photos of the Oregon State Mental Hospital. Masiel’s photos document the decay of the hospital and the 3500 copper canisters which hold the remains of residents of the mental hospital who were unwanted in life and in death. The dance honors the journey for wholeness, and explores the interior life of our most vulnerable, the people on our streets, the resilience of our human spirit, and the courage to go on in the face of adversity.
Upcoming Friday and Saturday Performances
Wayne Horwitz, Tucker Martine, Yukio Suzuki perform butoh and very cool music at the Royal Room in Columbia city. Sat they perform at the Rainier Beach art walk.
Sat 1pm to 3 Joan Laage and dancers at Seike Garden 138th and 24th s in Sea Tac,
Fringe Me Sept 20th – 23rd West Hall
“Like the small hole by the path-side something lives in,in me are lives I do not know the names of,
nor the fates of,
nor the hungers of or what they eat.
They eat of me.
Of small and blemished apples in low fields of me
whose rocky streams and droughts I do not drink.
And in my streets—the narrow ones,
unlabeled on the self-map—
they follow stairs down music ears can’t follow,
and in my tongue borrowed by darkness,
in hours uncounted by the self-clock,
they speak in restless syllables of other losses, other loves.
There too have been the hard extinctions,
missing birds once feasted on and feasting.
There too must be machines
like loud ideas with tungsten bits that grind the day.
A few escape. A mercy.
They leave behind
small holes that something unweighed by the self-scale lives in.” jane Hirshfield
Fringe On
“…where a woman’s deep life funds her mundane life. This old woman stands between the worlds of rationality and mythos. She is the knuckle bone on which these two worlds turn. This land between the worlds is that inexplicable place we all recognize once we experience it, but it’s nuances slip away and shape-change if one tries to pin them down, except when we use poetry, music, dance…or story.
There is speculation that the immune system of he body is rooted in this mysterious psychic land, and also the mystical, as well as all archetypal images and urges including our God-hunger, our yearning for all mysteries, and all the sacred instincts as well as those which are mundane. Some would say the records of humankind, the root of light and dark are also here. It is not a void, but rather the place of the Mist Beings where things are and also are not yet, where shadows have substace and substance is sheer.” Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Evening of Butoh and Live Sound Taoist Studies Institute 7:30 225 N 70th
White Autumn Breeze Evening of Butoh and live Sound Sept 8th 225 N 70th st 7:30
Taoist Studies Institute Shakuhachi & Flute by Larry Lawson Butoh Performance by Kaoru Okumura & Helen Thorsen
Seeing A Friend off Toward Hsi-k’ou
Wild geese go like leaves down the sky.
How should that be easy
for the traveler to hear?
A thousand mountains,
ten thousand streams,
where can we meet again?
Our faces won’t last like jade.
Life’s more like clouds…
Kuan Hsiu (832-912)
helenthorsendances 