| Butoh dance workshop with Daisuke Yoshimoto |
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Mon-Wed 3–5 December, 5pm–8pm Na Grobli Studio The work will focus on pushing the limits of the body. Through improvisation participants will learn new ways of perceiving space and will open themselves up to partner and group work. The workshop will culminate in a public presentation. Contact and Deadline If you wish to attend the workshop, please complete the application form and return it to irena@grotowski-institute.art.pl. The application deadline is 15 November 2012. We will get back to you by 19 November 2012. Workshop fee: 200 PLN Wed 5 December 8pm Work demonstration Na Grobli Studio Admission free  Butoh is a modern dance form born in Japan in the 1950s. After World War II, Japanese artists rejected traditional forms and the influence of Western mass culture, and turned for inspiration to the local agricultural mythology, Antonin Artaud’s ideas of the theatre of cruelty and German expressionism. This was reflected in the work of artists such as writer Yukio Mishima, poet and dramatist Shūji Terayama and dancer and choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata. These artists wanted to bring to light the officially ignored, dark aspects of the life of Japanese society – that of deformation and madness. Butoh breaks out of the confines of restrictive social tradition, offering unprecedented freedom of artistic expression. It probably remains the boldest attempt to transfer the mysterious, often suppressed life of the human unconscious through the interpersonal public medium of theatre. Like Surrealism, the early Butoh used the distortion of nature; like Dada, it used chance as a means for composition. Apart from Kauzo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata, the most acclaimed Butoh artists include Min Tanaka, Akaji Maro, Yoko Ashikawa and Daisuke Yoshimoto. Daisuke Yoshimoto graduated in art from the Theatre Department at the Nippon University in 1967. Since the early years of his stage career, he collaborated and co-created performances with the greatest Butoh masters such as Hisayo Iwaki, Yukihiko Sakai and Kazuo Ohno (as a stage manager for La Argentina in 1977 and My Mother in 1981). In 1983 he created his first Butoh piece, The Head of the Bird Woman. He has performed in many countries, including Austria, Denmark, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Norway, Ukraine, Hungary, Italy and the USA. He first time came to Poland as a stage manager with the group Ner-Kyōgen (Tokyo) to take part in an international festival of student theatres organized by Bogus³aw Litwiniec and Teatr Kalambur in Wroc³aw. In the 1990s he visited Poland several times with his pieces Eros and Thanatos (2004) and Ruined Body (2008), which he presented in Kraków, Lublin, Olsztyn, Poznañ, Szczecin, Warsaw and Wroc³aw (at the invitation of the Grotowski Centre and the Grotowski Institute). In 1997 he was the artistic consultant of a Butoh festival conceived and held by the Grotowski Centre. In 2004 he collaborated with Teatr ZAR on Gospels of Childhood as a dancer in a piece called Lazarus. In 2010, together with Jacek Ostaszewski and the music group Osjan, he performed Ruined Body in the Grand Theatre and National Opera in Warsaw and at the Cross-Culture Festival to mark the 40th anniversary of Osjan. Daisuke Yoshimoto’s Polish tour is organized by Stefania Gardecka.  |