Butoh Performance 'Piercing Heart' | Joan Laage/Kogut Butoh (USA)

Piercing Heart
Created by Joan Laage/Kogut Butoh
Commissioned music by Bill Horist

So many thoughts and desires pierce our consciousness, our hearts, sometimes settling, other times escaping through the fleeting air. Where do we find our freedom and peace? In confinement or total abandonment? Piercing Heart was performed twice at Shimmer: Seattle Summer Butoh Festival, at the Chapel venue in Seattle in 2023, at an experimental music festival in Vienna with musicians Florian Feit and Christoph Punzmann the same year, and in Chicago at Asian Improv aRts Midwest brought by Butoh Curious Chi. Joan also performed this piece at Spazio NU in Italy and in Bruxelles in winter 2026. Piercing Heart is a beautifully haunting piece full of yearning, turbulence, and compassion to a complex and riveting musical score.

Joan Laage/Kogut Butoh (USA)

After studying with masters Kazuo Ohno and Yoko Ashikawa in Tokyo in the late 80s and performing with Ashikawa’s group Gnome, Joan Laage/Kogut Butoh settled in Seattle and founded Dappin’ Butoh in 1990. She is a co-founder of DAIPANbutoh Collective. Joan performed at the New York, Chicago, Seattle, Amsterdam, Vienna, Paris, Warsaw, Santiago and Cancun butoh festivals, and a butoh symposium at the University of California (LA) along with Maro Akaji and Katsura Kan. A Ph.D. in Dance & Related Arts from Texas Woman’s University, she is featured in Sondra Fraleigh’s books and in Butoh America by Tanya Calamoneri. She creates site-specific work for Japanese gardens in Seattle annually. Joan is an avid Tai Chi practitioner with a background in Asian dance/theater. Since living in Krakow 2004-2006, she has been known as Kogut (rooster).

www.seattlebutoh-laage.com
@kogut_butoh (Instagram)

Sound (Not live)
BILL HORIST (USA)

Seattle-based guitarist Bill Horist delivers an idiosyncratic and richly emotive take on the world’s most ubiquitous instrument. Known internationally for his prepared guitar treatments, he’s played on dozens of records, performed throughout the Americas, Europe and Japan and has collaborated with numerous leading lights in a beguiling range of genres. His work is widely regarded alongside experimental guitar masters like Fred Frith and Keith Rowe.