Vangeline Theater/ New York Butoh Institute presents Queer Butoh 2023

Vangeline Theater/ New York Butoh Institute collaborates with The Brick Theater to present the seventh annual Queer Butoh with performances from June 28-30 2023 at 8pm at The Brick 579 Metropolitan Avenue Brooklyn. Tickets are $25 and available for purchase at https://ci.ovationtix.com/122/production/1163537. The shows will feature Abby Howard and Lela Besom (Arkansas) in Doll House; Scoop Slone in Origin (New York); Kori Koolman in Har Addam (New York/Israel); Yazmin Gonzalez & Andres Mauricio Sepulvda in Posturas (New York) and Tino Z. Mayers (New York) in Afro Child Soldier King. The running time is approximately two hours with an intermission. For more information visit https://www.bricktheater.com/event/queer-butoh-2023/2023-06-28/.

About the Pieces

Doll House. Created by Lela &Abby (L&A productions from Arkansas) Doll House is a performance exploring the layers of inherited gender oppression and challenging the idea of gender norms dress and behavioral expectations while opening to the wild animal self and recognizing the majestic truth in nature and love.

Origin is the first installment of Scoop Slone's three-part series titled States: Observations. Origin examines the state of quantum nothingness and the nature of existence at the atomic level drawing reference to the origin of the (queer) self which is evolving and the manifestations and potential of that self amidst feelings of outsiderism chameleonism aloneism and compartmentalization. The series is based upon the quantum physics principle that particles have potentials of reality and their state of being is not chosen until they are observed.

Afro Child Soldier King by Tino Zoccoli Mayers shows the True Story of the Life and Death of a Queer Black Anti-Hero. Like a Moses this innocent orphan is abducted to the Last Modern Neo-colonial Devil's Lair. The boy intoxicated by Revenge and overdosed on Toxic Masculinity makes his final Plea Bargain releasing a universal shame sorrow & redemption.

Har Addam by Kori Koolman.

The grandfather sleeps

The grandfather cries

The grandfather sings.

Posturas' by Yazmin Gonzalez and Andres Mauricio Sepulvda is a 15-minute foray into the stances and performative postures of power and seduction that genders borrow from each other and implement to construct their sense of "the other." The feminine and the masculine are explored with paced cynicism scrutiny and humor in an attempt to liberate what it means to identify as a biological and bisexually operating woman on Earth. In 'Posturas' the dancer relates to her shadow as the masculine force which guides her through determination and assertiveness and protects and sustains her sense of the feminine. The general unsafety around being "too feminine" is lived throughout.by Yazmin Gonzalez.

Artist Bios

Abby Howard is a songwriter singer musician stage artist events producer and director. She is an activist for Transgender rights life and love. She has been performing music and song since childhood touring the U.S. and Europe and recording albums with several bands. Since publicly coming out as trans in 2020 she has focused on performing solo work in Northwest Arkansas and leading the Warp and Weft performance project at Fenix Gallery's annual Queer Artist art exhibition in Fayetteville AR. Abby grew up in Vian Oklahoma the youngest of 8 kids in a religious family who spread the word through pop up preaching events and religious publications created in their at-home printing press. This developed her propensity for sharing her voice through the stage and page as well as through on the ground activism. For years she has been an activist for the Poor People Campaign traveling to protests in NY and DC writing and leading songs at the protests. She has run several businesses built several houses and created a non-profit to repair vehicles for low-income folks. Now she is teaming up with Lela Besom to run a production company in Northwest Arkansas so they may develop and present their artwork create a platform for butoh and trans awareness as well as produce art events for Northwest Arkansas and visiting artists. 

Lela Besom is a socially engaged interdisciplinary artist educator producer and choreographer working out of Northwest Arkansas. Besom has studied performed taught and collaborated in the U.S. Mexico Indonesia and Europe. She is a former member of DAIPANbutoh Collective in Seattle and co-creator of the international performance project Trio De Femmes. Besom earned her BFA in fine arts from the University of Kansas moved to the Cambridge Zen Center in Cambridge MA in 2008 then to Seattle in 2011 where she lived for seven years. Currently in her home state of Arkansas Besom is recognizing the importance of being queer visible. Growing up she had no representation as the queer people she knew seemed nothing like her. Now she is working to create space for celebrate and normalize fringed life and finds a connection with butoh in this way as Hijikata also centered queerness and other marginalized people/taboo lifestyles that are actually part of the truth of our shared world. 

Tina "Tino" Zoccoli-Mayers. First trained in 2012 to teach aerobic "flowing" Vinyasa yoga with the NYC-based Yoga to the People at their San Francisco and Berkeley California studio locations Tino finds a symbiotic relationship between dance yoga Butoh & meditation. Tina "Tino" Zoccoli-Mayers danced professionally in our capital's Washington Ballet Studio Company 2004-5. As an honors student at Stanford University CA they were blessed to meet West Coast postmodern dance pioneer Anna Halprin; they danced later at her famed "Mountain Home Studio" outside over the redwood forests. Their 2010 honors thesis awarded for innovative research explored West African literature postcolonial Marxist philosophies and Sufi mysticisms. Currently Tino transitions in modern and postmodern Dancing & Butoh with writing; film; Feminism: transfeminism ecofeminism xenofeminism Black feminism and existential feminism; para-modernism; multi-culturalisms; and New Genre studies to heal from chronic illness with art movement therapies. They debuted their human-rights-awareness Japanese movement theater solo "S/he or S/hekinah" with Vangeline's Queer Butoh 18 on the Lower East Side NYC.

Scoop Slone's creative practice explores identity and memory through performance based experiences of drag alter ego Geometrica 222. Scoop intersects Butoh Garmenting Opera Club Kid Drag and Installation that reference applied arts applied science and applied life. Geometrica 222's character development occurs over time set in the primal future past self-examining through It's existing moment to moment in archaeologically unfolding internal and external landscapes of humyn & nonhumyn origins. The primal future past is utilized influenced by speculative science fiction looking forward into a solitary existence of being as if the observer is at a natural history museum in the future reflecting on a distant ancestor. Scoop continually seeks to examine quantum physics archaeology and biological concepts to infuse into the work seeking to query Who Am I? in both the personal and collective sense Who Am We?. These queries manifest in the body through Butoh's abstract expressionist nature in both the macro (universal) and micro (atomic) sense balancing the tangible and the esoteric. Praised by NY Times for "gamely vocal stylings" Scoop's performance history additionally lies in Grand Opera Rock Opera and Musicals and Rock Bands with further vocal performance experience in legit country jazz americana and pop genres with a long term career in Film/TV/Music Videos/Commercials/Modeling.

Kori Koolman is a multidisciplinary artist and art educator based in NYC. For the past eight years Koolman has been a student at The New York Butoh Institute.

Yazmin Gonzalez began her dance education at 18 studying Egyptian Classical Belly Dance under the guidance of Maria Jammal. Upon moving to N.Y. she encountered East Coast Tribal Belly dance and became enamored with the fusion path. She has been a student of the Solstice Tribe for five years now and has been influenced by the movement aesthetics of Sera Solstice and Zuleika Milan. Seeking to provoke emotional exploration through movement she came to the New York Butoh Institute and became immediately enamored with the profound power of focus and deliberation that the art form offers. She currently studies under the primary guidance of Vangeline and has been privileged to train with several Butoh masters such as Atsushi Takenouchi Tetsoro Fukuhara Yumiko Yoshioka and Joan Laage. Throughout a decade of inner diving she has sought to transfer the arising emotions in her movement through a melding of Middle-Eastern Latin-Fusion and Butoh dance. Her first solo 'Desire' was showcased in 2019 for the N.Y. Butoh Institutefestival and her second and latest work 'Venus Invites' was a part of this year's return of the Ritual Cabaret Festival. Yazmin is a bisexual identifying human and finds sustenance in her explorations of gender when in a state of dance. Her works profess vulnerability investigate seduction and plead for the integration of seeming opposites.

Andres Mauricio Sepulvda is a queer-identifying creator and painter from Colombia and a recent N.Y. transplant. He has accumulated 47 years of experience in architectural illustration as a former civil draftsman and is a well known artisan from the region of Armenia. He is a self-taught painter who expresses himself in the colorful depictions of his homeland. His paintings explore symbiosis in nature fertility and lush landscapes that swirl endlessly into tangible daydreams. Andres paints on various textiles and sells his work online on the streets and parks of New York City. He is motivated by the ocular experience of witnessing Butoh and believes in the power of the dance to transform both the dancer and the viewer. He feels liberated honored and truly welcomes the chance to part-take in a queer-positive festival in his beloved new city.

Vangeline (Curator) is a teacher dancer and choreographer specializing in Japanese butoh. She is the artistic director of the Vangeline Theater/New York Butoh Institute (New York) a dance company firmly rooted in the tradition of Japanese butoh while carrying it into the twenty-first century. With her all-female dance company Vangeline's socially conscious performances tie together butoh and activism. Vangeline is the founder of the New York Butoh Institute Festival which elevates the visibility of women in butoh and the festival Queer Butoh. She pioneered the award-winning 15-year running program The Dream a Dream Project which brings butoh dance to incarcerated men and women at correctional facilities across New York State. Vangeline is a 2022/2023 Gibney Dance Dance in Process residency and the winner of a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Dance Award. She is also a 2018 NYFA/NYSCA Artist Fellow in Choreography for Elsewhere; the winner of the 2015 Gibney Dance Social Action Award as well as the 2019 Janet Arnold Award from the Society of Antiquaries of London. She is the author of the critically-acclaimed book: Butoh: Cradling Empty Space which explores the intersection of butoh and neuroscience. She pioneered the first neuroscientific study of Butoh ("The Slowest Wave;" Her work is the subject of CNN's "Great Big Story" "Learning to Dance with your Demons." She is also featured on BBC's podcast Deeply Human with host Dessa (episode 2 of 12:Why We Dance) www.vangeline.com

VANGELINE THEATER/ NEW YORK BUTOH INSTITUTE aims to preserve the legacy and integrity of Japanese Butoh while carrying the art form well into the future. www.vangeline.com

The Brick enters its third decade with a bold new vision and an abiding belief in the power of art. With a renewed focus on multi-week theatrical runs and a dynamic line-up of singular one-off events The Brick is Williamsburg's primary incubator of innovative theater and performing arts. bricktheater.com

This program was supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

Host or Publisher Lilli Stein