Butoh-Inspired Movement Meditation with Live Music
Schedule
Sun, 14 Jun, 2026 at 04:00 pm
UTC-07:00Location
The Alembic | Berkeley, CA
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Butoh is a slow, surreal movement practice rooted in deep listening, imagination, and transformation. In these guided movement meditations, we explore the body as landscape, myth, and memory, softening habitual patterns and awakening new ways of being. No dance experience is needed, only a curiosity and openness to move, feel, and enter the unknown.Each class begins with a gentle opening circle to arrive, ground, and set intention together. We move into a somatic warm-up, awakening sensation, breath, and subtle awareness in the body. From there, you’ll be guided through a butoh-fu score, poetic, image and/or narrative based original prompts that invite transformation from the inside out, allowing the body to become something other than itself. We’ll also explore simple butoh exercises that deepen presence, perception, connection, and imaginative embodiment.
We close with a soft landing: time to integrate, reflect, and share (if desired), leaving you resourced, expanded, and a little more in touch with the mysterious intelligence of your body. Come as you are, and leave having touched something vast, intimate, and unknowably alive within you.
TEACHER BIO
Maya Kaufmann is a movement artist, educator, and ritualist prayerformer whose work is rooted in the belief that the body is a site of knowledge, devotion, and transformation. Raised by Zen meditation teachers and authors, she grew up immersed in contemplative practice, shaping a movement philosophy grounded in presence, listening, and reverence for what emerges through the body. Drawing from modern dance, belly fusion, butoh, and somatic traditions, her approach honors both form and flow, structure and surrender, inviting movement to arise as inquiry rather than display.
Maya holds a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies from UC Berkeley, with concentrations in Dance Practice, Philosophy, and Anthropology, and a minor in Creative Writing. Her thesis, “The Divinity of Dance,” explores how dancers encounter spirituality, liminality, and altered states through embodied practice, and how this divinity inspires care and compassion. With over a decade of teaching experience, she has guided movement across a wide range of contexts - from accessible dance for humans with disabilities, ecstatic dance facilitation, fusion technique classes, ceremonial movement, and meditation-based somatic work. Alongside her teaching, Maya performs internationally in ritual and contemporary dance settings, weaving sensuality, shadow, and mythic presence into work that blurs the boundary between altar and stage.
Whether onstage or in the studio, Maya’s work centers inclusivity, emotional alchemy, and the liberatory potential of dance. She conjures spaces where devotion becomes motion, where archetypes breathe through flesh, and where transformation moves with its own wild grace.
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Where is it happening?
The Alembic, 2820 7th St,Berkeley, California, United StatesEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
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