Tadashi Endo - Butoh MA Workshop and Student Performance

Five day Intensive Butoh Workshop culminating in a student performance. Full participation is recommended. Dance or movement background encouraged but not required.

WORKSHOP CONTENT:
When Tadashi Endo is teaching, he offers challenging warm ups, improvisational scores and choreographic work. He gives a deep view into Butoh philosophy and speaks to what Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata were thinking and tells us about their lives. But first he lets the students search for their own Butoh. To quote Kazuo Ohno, “everybody can dance Butoh,” it may be not the Japanese Butoh, but everybody can find their own movements in the sense of Butoh.

This will be Tadashi’s forth visit to Chicago. He performed IKIRU- Requiem para Pina Bausch to a sold out show at the Old Town School of Folk Music in 2015 and Fukushima Mon Amour at Columbia College Chicago in 2016. He has led series of sold out workshops at OuterSpace Studios in Wicker Park, including HAUTNAH, which culminated in a student performance in 2019. We will focus on recovering, the space between things, finding new patterns, new imaginations, discovering new sensations, and encouraging continued growth in each of our bodies.

The workshop and performance will take place onsite @Co-Prosperity Sphere. The audience will sit very close, which means we must be strong and present. During this workshop, Tadashi will give you time and space for you to research yourself and your signature movements under his guidance. We will focus on recovering, the space between things, finding new patterns, new imaginations, discovering new sensations, and encouraging continued growth in each of our bodies. We will create a performance together, where everyone will get solo moments to shine, partner work, and structured group improvisations.

WORKSHOP CALENDAR:
August 6-10, Tuesday - Friday 6-10pm; 4hrs/night + Saturday 5-9pm
Total: 20 hours
REGISTRATION PRICES:
$280 for full workshop. $60 per class, multiple classes packages available, including early bird discount packages. Approximately $14/student hour.

This workshop does build every day, but our lives and schedules may not allow for complete immersion. Come to as many as you can, and we welcome all curious bodies! The space does have a long set of stairs however, so regrettfully is not wheelchair/handicapped accessible. Student/volunteer discounts available upon request and availability. Contact [email protected] for details.

STUDENT PERFORMANCE:
Saturday, August 10
Doors open 6:30pm, performance begins 7pm
$15 (suggested donation)
@Co-Prosperity Sphere, 3219-21 S Morgan St, Chicago, IL 60608

ABOUT TADASHI ENDO:
Elève of the great butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno, is a Butoh-dancer, choreographer, director of the Butoh-Centre MAMU and artistic director of the Butoh-Festivals MAMU Butoh & Jazz in Göttingen. He has coined his own way of Butoh dance which he calls “Butoh-MA”. MA is a very important word in zen buddhism, which has two meanings: the “emptiness” and “the space between the things”. Butoh-MA is one way to find the invisible visible. He believes the minimum of movements lets the expression of feelings and situations grow to highest intensity. For this work, it is more important to keep the balance between energy, tension and control than to care for the aesthetics of movement.

His dance is a synthesis of theatre, performance and dance. Tadashi Endo expresses the field of tension between ying and yang, male and female, and their everlasting alteration. “He manages to fill that void with a poetic beauty, precision movement and spiritual flavour. It`s like cut grass and cut glass, one smells good and brings back memory, the other cuts into you leaving a scar.” David Carter

Tadashi Endo collaborates with Germany’s most popular film- and opera director DORIS DÖRRIE, as choreographer for the opera Madame Butterfly (Theater am Gärtnerplatz München 2006), for the cinema film HANAMI-KIRSCHBLÜTEN (2007), the opera ADMETO (International Haendel Festival Göttingen and International Festival Edinburgh 2009) and DON GIOVANNI (Hamburgische Staatsoper 2011, 2012). In all these productions Tadashi Endo also appears as a solo dancer.

Since 2009 he is in continuous collaboration with Italy’s prima ballerina assoluta CARLA FRACCI, in “I HAVE A DREAM” (Teatro Massimo/Palermo Sicily 2009), and FUTURISMO (Teatro Nazionale in Rome, Italy 2010). Tadashi Endo is a guest professor at the Hochschule für Darstellende Kunst Frankfurt am Main, Germany, The Academy of Music and Dance in Jerusalem, Israel, and at the Nucleo Interdisciplinar des Pesyuisas TeatrUnicamp, University Campinas, Brazil.

Tadashi Endo is brought to you in partnership with Sara Zalek, Butoh Curious Chi, Watershed Arts & Ecology and Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Host or Publisher Sara Zalek