Butoh
Butoh dance training is an invaluable tool for dancers, actors, and creative people of all types. Zalek leads you in exercises to expand your body physically and energetically through breath and meditation techniques, vocal warm-ups, Noguchi Taiso, Qigong, Daoyin, visual imagery and improvisational scores.
This workshop lights on ideas of the transformative body and the importance of the lived moment, in order to experience some essential concepts in Butoh. Experimenting with distortion in timing, the uncanny, and the grotesque, we explore how presence and space can be activated on different temporalities. Applying these techniques can expand the vocabulary of embodied movement. This workshop encourages participants to find beauty in the horror of the grimace, to transform ourselves from one state to another, and move from deeply internal impulses to find more unique expressions in our outer movements. We will work with forms, images, and butoh fu from the lineage of Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno and students and descendants of these Butoh traditions.
There will be time for reflection using automatic writing and/or drawing exercises and short improvised showings to more fully integrate ideas into usable material for making strong choreographic and performance decisions. This is a supportive environment to start an individual and collective process of investigation through creative movement. We will open and expand our awareness, move with our subtler senses, create and witness our personal body language.
Sara Zalek is a multidisciplinary artist, teacher, researcher, producer, and curator of performances, festivals, and workshops. For the last 20 years they have traveled nationally and internationally to study, perform, and facilitate Butoh dance teaching. They have performed and curated performances at the Chicago Cultural Center, High Concept Labs, Compound Yellow, Elastic Arts, Experimental Sound Studio, Lumpen Radio, dfbrl8r, SITE/less, Firehouse Arts in Bellingham, WA, Urban Guild in Kyoto, Japan, and so many more. The City of Chicago named them an Esteemed Artist in 2022.
Zalek’s practice includes a depth of somatic research and study, especially in Daoyin, QiGong, Noguchi Taiso–all fundamental to Butoh practice. Besides teaching Butoh, they co-lead hybrid vocal and movement workshops and dance classes for children in afterschool programs. Additionally, they engage in music and vocal study, as well as frequent performances in theater, improvisational music and dance, group choreography, video and sound editing, and writing; including audio and video descriptions, as well as artistic and ecological research.
Teaching experience includes seven years of weekly Butoh Body classes, as well as guest spots at Beloit College, Beloit, WI, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, DePaul University; and several residencies including LightBox Detroit, Elastic Arts, Ragdale Foundation, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Links Hall, High Concept Labs at MANA Contemporary, Chicago Cultural Center, and Edgar Miller Legacy Studio. They host Master level Butoh teachers through Butoh Curious Chi