Butoh Workshop (for the shining light under the earth)

In the ongoing re-forming of Butoh, dance in honor of Koichi Tamano. All profits will go to supporting a memorial to his memory.

Instructor: Shinichi Iova-Koga

In the 1960’s, the avant-garde arts in Japan flourished in an atmosphere of protest and civil dis-obedience. Japanese identity was confusingly intertwined with American values and cultural transformation. Within this bewildering environment, performing arts such as Butoh Dance emerged, touching on and deconstructing the extremes between Western modern dance and Japanese traditional arts.

The first steps towards transformation exist in time. Suspend, extend and compress the temporal experience with physical precision and imagistic fluidity to open the potential of the moment. Complex and nuanced forces shape the gesture, arising when the gates of mind, energy and body open.

The workshop will integrate improvisational training and form based guidance to open doorways to our mysterious dance.

Shinichi Iova-Koga is grateful for his formative time in Hiroko and Koichi Tamano’s Harupin Ha in the early 1990’s. 

He serves as the Founder and Artistic Director of inkBoat. The dance theater company has received six San Francisco Izzie awards  and has toured in Europe, Asia and the USA.

He is the editor of the book 95 Rituals, a tribute to Anna Halprin, and a contributing writer to The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance. He is featured in the book Butoh America.

His martial arts training focuses on the Daoist Internal Arts (Qi Gong, Dao Yin, Yang Sheng Gong and Nei Gong). His credentials to teach come through Lotus Nei Gong International and Wudang West. He holds a 2nd degree black belt in Aikido (with teachers Jan Nevelius, Jorma Lily and Cornelius Jaeger-Herzog). He trained in Judo as a child under his father, Yuzo Koga, a 6-time USA Judo champion.

Shinichi is an Authorized Action Theater™ teacher through his mentor Ruth Zaporah. Other significant mentors are Ralph Lemon, who instigated ideas about “anti-dance,” and Anna Halprin, who encouraged community building through the art-making process. Shinichi served as Anna’s associate director for numerous projects from 2009-2012 and co-taught dances for men with her until 2018.

Significant collaborators include Ko Murobushi (Butoh Dance), Ann Carlson (Contemporary Dance), Rova Saxophone Quartet (Jazz),  Sleepytime Gorilla Museum (Experimental Rock Band), AXIS Dance Company (Mixed Ability Contemporary Dance), Yuko Kaseki (Butoh Dance), Yumiko Yoshioka and TEN PEN CHii (Butoh and Installation Art) and Do Theatre (Physical Theater). 

Shinichi teaches each year at ImpulsTanz in Vienna, independent workshops (live and online) and within University dance programs, most notably as a core faculty member at Mills College in California from 2009-2017, and at UC Davis as a Visiting Professor in 2014 and in 2022 as a Granada Artist in Residence.  He has taught workshops at Bath University (U.K.), UC Riverside, UC Berkeley, SF State University, Stanford University, Experimental Theater Wing at NYU/Tisch, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (Switzerland), Texas Women’s University, University of Nevada, Reno, and others. He co-teaches the workshop “Dance on Land” and multi-month workshops with his wife Dana Iova-Koga in California, Vermont, Switzerland and Portugal. 

Shinichi works primarily in San Francisco, New York and Luzern, Switzerland.

Shinichi’s work has been described as a mix of “humor, introspection, playfulness and memory with fearless gestures and thoughtfully crafted drama” (Mary Ellen Hunt, SF Chronicle) and has been said to “expertly mine the dark vein of absurdist humor that infiltrates Butoh” (Allen Ulrich, SF Chronicle).

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