Tanya Calamoneri and Michael J. Morris are excited to offer a joint workshop bringing together practices drawn from their studies and experiences of butoh. Butoh is a postmodern dance form that emerged in Japan in the 1950s in the work of Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, which has now migrated and evolved in many directions around the world.
Butoh methods experiment with perception by engaging with a multitude of images. Butoh invites surrender in the sense of letting go of rigid or static ideas of self and opening to who or how else we might become. It is a dance that was born as a protest against the alienation of humanity, and butoh practice can be both a profoundly healing and artistically refreshing mode of expression.
This will be a three-hour introductory workshop, sharing a series of facilitated experiences from Tanya and Michael’s own practices as well as those of their teachers and collaborators. There will be a short break about halfway through the workshop.
No previous experience with butoh or any other dance form required.
Pricing: $30 per person, no one turned away for lack of funds.
Tanya Calamoneri performed and toured with Shinichi Koga’s butoh company inkBoat from 2000-2003 and then moved to NYC where she founded physical theater group Company SoGoNo from 2003-2014. Her work has received NY Innovative Theater awards and grants from the New York State Council on the Arts and New York Arts Foundation. She has been on faculty at Colgate University, Texas Tech University, and taught masterclasses at NYU, Temple University, Stonybrook University, TWU, Drexel, Universidad del Estado de Mexico and Escuela de Danza Contemporanea in Mexico City, and numerous community studios in San Francisco and New York. She draws from butoh, physical theater, clown, aerial, and Western contemporary and classical dance. She loves to work with props and installation-type sets, and her movement is driven by interplay with images and non-human states. She teaches dance and wellness at The Ohio State University.
Michael J. Morris is an artist, astrologer, tarot reader, writer, educator, and facilitator. They hold a PhD in Dance Studies from The Ohio State University. Their work is concerned with destabilizing normative categories through which bodies are made to live and proliferating difference as an irreducible multiplicity through which more lives might come to matter. They have had the opportunity to teach internationally at ImPulTanz (Austria), Ponderosa (Germany), and SNDO—the School for New Dance Development (Netherlands). They were a Visiting Assistant Professor at Denison University from 2015-2021, and they have previously facilitated workshops and lectured at University of Michigan, Middlebury College, California State University Long Beach, The College at Brockport SUNY, Point Park University, Oberlin College, University of Wisconsin Madison, Virginia Commonwealth University, Otterbein University, Ohio Wesleyan University, and The Ohio State University. Michael has studied Butoh in both the U.S. and at the Kazuo Ohno Studio in Yokohama, Japan.