November 18 to 22, 2024
9:30 am to 1:30 pm (Mon-Fri)
Full week: $125 (taxes included)
Drop-in: $33 (available one month prior)
Language of instruction: English
Questions can be asked in English.
CATEGORY
OBJECTIF
In Butoh, we train the body and the imagination by working from vivid internal conditions expressed through intense physicality. We’ll work to reveal an inner life of authenticity and paradox and to express our humanity in all of its irrationality, ugliness, beauty, and mirth.
CONTENT
Works of Japanese dance and theatre are often expressions of cycles of life, death and re-birth. In this workshop we’ll explore the embodiment of cyclic existence in many ways. Using the cycles of natural phenomenon like the water cycle and the life of clouds and flowers to guide us, we’ll embody manifestations of our mortality as dance and performance.
| Workshop Pace | Workshop Features |
| Variable | Intense emotional work Short verbal applications Exercises are adaptable Subgroups exercises Floor work |
BIOGRAPHY
Denise Fujiwara’s work as a dance artist has developed over 40 years of intensive practice, performance and study. Her most influential mentors include the late Japanese Butoh masters Natsu Nakajima and Yukio Waguri, and master dance pedagogue and dramaturg, Elizabeth Langley. She has developed a practice of Butoh that artfully assists participants to experience deeply embodied movement through the cultivation of curiosity, the imagination, awareness and presence. Her Butoh repertoire has travelled to 4 continents.
She has led workshops and master classes across Canada and the U.S.A., in Denmark, Poland, Germany, the U.K., Costa Rica, Colombia, Ecuador and India. “Noppera-bo”, created with filmmaker William Yong, won a One-Reeler Short Film Competition 2020 Award of Excellence in Los Angeles and her live works, Eunoia and Moving Parts continue to tour. She is a recipient of the Toronto Arts Foundation’s Muriel Sherrin Award for international achievement in dance.
The training was so skillfully led that Denise was seamlessly able to incorporate multiple perspectives for the application of these concepts and orientations/awareness into many performance modalities, but more importantly, into our lives writ large! What a joyous experience with the dance of darkness!
— Mikiki