COMPOST MIX REMIX | post/butoh dance workshop with live music

composition, decomposition, combination
For dancers, people curious and enthusiastic to move, interdisciplinary artists, philosophers, pedagogues, facilitators, the ecosexy, butoh lovers and curious, humans looking to mix and remix all the challenging and beautiful facets of life . . .
In COMPOST MIX REMIX, we dance imaginative, inspired, expansive, nuanced, surreal, and new senses in our body and the group body with nature metaphors, and to dance and reflect with the cycles of life, with our personal memories and the public media that remind us of grief and beauty in a temporary community space of the workshop. We look for new mixes, release, pleasurable confrontations, and processes.

details:
November 16 - 10-17h, with one hour break
November 17 - 11-21h, with breaks and butoh ritual performance in the evening
At PARK STUDIO | Am Treptower Park 42, 12435 Berlin
+++ 120-200€ sliding scale (for ~15 hours)
with 2 supported spots for qt/bipoc folx <3
~~~ email [email protected] to join

In the two days, we will start with relaxing, releasing, and activating movements, building into dances that are physical and internal inspired by imagination of nature, and methods of butoh dance and process work somatics. We will dance indoors and outdoors in the beautiful garden space, to live music of percussions, gong, and electronics by Wieland Möller. On the last night, we will dance together in a butoh ritual performance with the workshop movers as a temporary ensemble with improvised and structured scores, open for invited guests.
Depending on the weather, we will dance at Treptower Park across the studio. With the proposed explorations, there will also be time for integrating with reflective dialogues with talking and the language of the arts, as well as breaks and space.
All bodies are welcome, interested in exploring depths with movement. Practices are open for all levels of experience and differently-abled bodies.
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more background:
Movers from the US shared that this workshop shared poetic and imaginative ways of moving with nature metaphors, that can be expansive, deep, and fun. They can feel the older practices for dance and meditation being evolved to integrate our contemporary lives of info, public media, and closeness and farness of what happens around the world~~~ for example, in being curious about our relationships to phones and dancing what is realistic, unrealistic, hyperexaggerated, theatrical, and subtle in our lives when we are alone, online, and together. Movers also found it compelling to dig and research into their own patterns and cycles, and find the different ingredients that would allow them to compost. In the workshop, nonverbal ways of communicating can allow for subconscious and emotions and ways of relating to emerge and bodies could feel, explore, and research in the temporary community.
Butoh dance started as a way of processing all the deaths after WWII. As my teacher shares, we dance to dance with the nature that makes us, All. Compost Mix Remix, is a new remix of ancient, natural, and the now with the paradoxes of being with the possibilities of expansion with connections to nature and the depths and layers and new emerging with emotions, beauty, atrocities, personal, world, relational, and imagined new fields. This workshop experience is a love letter for living and moving with the process, mystery, experimenting with old and evolving values between the earthy gutteral, and expansive sky, with our social realities, inner worlds and imagination, ...

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reflections and questions to be danced ~
with nature and new nature within us
~ Where are the connections and disconnections between relating to Nature, and the modern nature of our city lives? What happens when you embody an element of nature in contrast to modern, mechanical, or urban metaphors?
~ What do we feel,sense,learn from embodied metaphors of nature ecology and pathways?
~ What strengths and characteristics can we dance, embody, and live from nature spots?
~ Butoh dance uses imagery of nature layered with other images to create new feelings and experiences. How do we integrate socio-political questions that are important today, with the body, and explore to know something new?
~ What applies and doesn’t apply to the heady atmosphere we have to live with? Can we think of our mental landscapes as nature as well?
~ In movement, how do we balance the desire to escape into nature with the overwhelming pace of city life? How does the body respond to these competing impulses?
~ For example, metaphors of decay, typhoons, water, and the mother are deep parts of my dreaming body in life, art, and psychology, in how I process and show up in personal and world-level conflicts.
internally
~ When are we dancing and creating art for pleasure and escape, versus looking for strength and new possibilities for resilience and endurance?
~ How does our inner nature evolve in cycles?
~ What are our organic reactions and possible responses to surprises or processes that get in the way?
~ What makes old archetypes, ours / mine? What queers, subverts, and makes relevant ancient archetypes?
~ How do we notice mental information conflicting with our embodied feelings in movement? What happens when we process and combine the separate experiences and senses?
~ How does your body carry the weights of the collective struggles and yours ~ over time?
relationally
~ How do our inner natures dance in relation?
~ This experience is important as it creates an embodied practice of long-term values like patience, resilience, and the experiences that go beyond words, as well as experimenting moving together in a temporary community.
~ From disruption and tension, how do new layers and metaphors add to feelings of shifts, changes, and transformations?
~ When all is falling in chaos and disruption. How do we navigate relational webs? What role does connection play in times of instability?
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Dancer Min Yoon and Musician Wieland Möller fuse together butoh dance, sound, psychosomatic therapy, conflict studies (process work) and artistic practice with nature and awareness.
The movement scores will be inspired by long form evolution, repetition, and changes in the body from Min’s dance research, as well as fusing with JINEN butoh nature practices of butoh master, Atsushi Takenouchi that bring together the personal and universal senses of nature.
*** note
With an intentional and strong container for depth, beauty, and multi-sensory awareness, this will be a place for artistic processing, and not necessarily therapy although no doubt art can be therapeutic. We will encourage community support and Min will be open to talk during some of the breaks.

/from recent workshop, photos by Nanda Agostino

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WORDS ABOUT MIN’S HOLDING SPACE:
“I was surprised, touched, and carried through this experience, within the gentle, fluid container that Min created for us. I found new parts of myself and reconnected with old ones, stripping away the facade of who I wanted others to see and revealing the parts of me that have always tried to hide. I will forever remember this experience, which has opened doors for me as to what movement can look like and be.” - Jen
“Min facilitated sessions which included written reflections, storytelling, expressive movement, movement based in imagery and imagination, interview-type conversations, and drawing. The range of activities meant that an idea seeded in one area could move to another, and another, and eventually become something very different in form, yet connected in concept, to the initial inspiration. This experience, guided and supported by Min, invited (but never forced) me into the depths of memory and psyche, alternative movement pathways, and new perspectives. I experienced emotional opening and relief as a result of working with Min and a shift in how I related to old stories about my life and my body. The research felt important to my healing process and also empowered me to show up differently– more aware, present, and understanding– in my relationships. While no two sessions were alike, I always felt held in the patient and loving container that Min created. I appreciated working with Min and their one-of-a-kind approach to praxis/therapy and highly recommend their work!” - Nicola

images with deep movers from past workshop experiences/
photography by Palo y Piedra

ARTISTS BIO
Min Yoon tr. Citizen Truth | dancetotheedge.com + insta @dancetotheedge
With butoh dance, vocals, and conflict studies, Min makes intimate, surreal, and psychosomatic performances and experiences of heightened relational emotions, permission for depths, and the emergent new. Min dances difficult truths beyond language through plurality of perspectives, unintentional movements within stillness and impulsive improvisation, and archetypes. Their dance collages intense imagery and physicality, stillness, and ritual.
Min has been mixing butoh dance, conflict studies, and somatic therapy to bring workshops to communities in Berlin, Vienna, Basel, Ii, SF, Portland, LA, and more cities as well as off the map places. Min teaches workshops as well as creates experimental community performances in artistic institutions and community spaces.
Recent works switch between listening to their own body and the bodies of others. Their current solo work dancing-being-in-time depicts loops of movements, vocal tremors, and memories, with the body as an archive of pain, states, and transformation. In dancing with violence, they researched the bodily memories of violence of another dancer to create an auditory theater piece that invites the listeners to move and lightly embody the experiences poetically. In solo dance works, they connect conflicts within the body to archetypes and collective experiences, such as the Joker archetype and feelings of remorse at the edge of revenge, and comfort women (forced prostitutes of the Japanese army) as an older archetype engaging with the #metoo movement. In their choreographic experiments, they question how bodies respond and move together in groups, how we may find instinctual ways to move together beyond how our bodies were trained.
In Germany, Min danced at Dock11, Hošek Contemporary Gallery, Oyoun, ZK/U, Petersburg Arts Space, Trauma Bar und Kino (in residency), Kühlspot Social Club, p7 Gallery, Haus der Statistik, and 4fürtanz (leipzig). In the U.S. Min danced at CounterPulse (sf), Headwaters Theater (pdx), ProArts Gallery (sf), Highways Performance Space (la), Epic Immersive (sf). Min also dances in the streets and many underground community spaces as well as in churches and a temple devoted to Minerva in Italy.
Min’s performances and social art works have been funded by NATIONALES PERFORMANCE NETZ (npn) in Germany, Dachverband Tanz Deutschland, Kultuuri Kaupilla in Finland, The City of Oakland, The Battery Club of San Francisco, and the Awesome Foundation, with other artist residencies and grants. Min has also been a fellow at Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (ZK/U Berlin) and an artcorps scholar at the Tamalpa Institute founded by Daria and Anna Halprin.

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Min and Wieland met at X...it! international butoh festival 5 years ago and have since collaborated on sound and movement projects that process deep emotions and topics such as the embodied memories of east/west Germany, dancing with violence, military sex violence, and group body research in crises, as well as improvisations with “pure” sound and movement.

Wieland Möller | wielandmoeller.com
Wieland Möller is an experienced performer based in Berlin with movement and sound for over 20 years in the fields of jazz, improvised music, and contemporary dance. He recently completed a new Masters degree at the Musikhochschule Dresden on the connection of sound and movement, especially on the physicality of playing an instrument into extended movements and performative qualities. His recent solo performance work brings this research together with the topic of perception and awareness of different spaces. He is fascinated by making sounds visual and motions audible.
He studied at the Rotterdams Conservatory, Rhythmic Conservatory Copenhagen and Berklee College of Music and in New York. He has been a scholar of the Berklee College of Music, Goethe Institution Germany, and GVL. Wieland is the founder of the Akvariet Trio. He has performed at the Buenos Aires Jazz Festival, Jazz International Rotterdam Festival and among others, and has toured Germany, The Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Argentina and Iceland.
Being a performing musician and composer, Wieland Möller has been involved in dance and theater projects and performances, among others at the Biennale Berlin 2018, Junge Deutsche Oper Berlin, Gripstheatre, Reykjavik Dance Festival and Prague Dance Festival. He has worked with Kazuhisa Uchihashi, Markus Stockhausen, Klaas Hekman, Tobias Delius, Julyen Hamilton, Ingo Reulecke, Okwui Okpokwasili and other collaborators.

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