The Salish Sea Butoh Festival proudly presents our 2025 MAINSTAGE FESTIVAL PERFORMANCES !!
featuring renowned artists from JAPAN, AUSTRALIA, FRANCE, MEXICO and Indonesia !!
*** Friday, AUGUST 22nd and Saturday, AUGUST 23rd ***
Join us for a very special weekend of Live theatrical performances celebrating the unique artform of Japanese Butoh. This is a production of the 2025 Salish Sea Butoh Festival in beautiful Port Townsend, Washington in celebration of our festival's 5-year anniversary. This show highlights veteran Japanese artists of the 1st generation of Butoh in the lineage of Butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata along with 2nd, 3rd, and 4th generation Butoh artists from all over the world performing on the same stage. All ticket purchases include admission to a post-show social for a chance to meet and talk to the artists.
* FRIDAY, August 22 — MainStage Performance # 1
LOCATION: USO Hall at Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend, WA
7:30 PM – Doors open
8:00 PM to 10:00 PM – showtime
Artist LINEUP for FRIDAY MAINSTAGE PERFORMANCE:
Rosemary Candelario (Austin, TX)
Joan Laage (Seattle, WA)
– INTERMISSION –
Eugenia Vargas (México)
Espartaco Martinez (México)
* SATURDAY, August 23 — MainStage Performance # 2
Location: USO Hall at Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend, WA
7:30 PM – Doors open
8:00 PM to 10:00 PM – showtime
Artist LINEUP for SATURDAY MAINSTAGE PERFORMANCE:
Yuri Nagaoka (Japan)
Iván-Daniel Espinosa & Co. (Chicago + Seattle)
– INTERMISSION –
Seisaku (Japan)
Yumi Umiumare (Australia)
To read full biographies of the artist lineup and guest performers, go to: https://www.salishseabutoh.com/workshop-teachers
ABOUT BUTOH:
Butoh (舞踏, Butō) is a form of avant-garde dance-theater that originated in Tokyo, Japan after WWII. It is characterized by physical movements that tend towards the earth and the subconscious. Butoh, which is influenced by Surrealism, Neo-Dada, German Expressionism, French avant-garde literature, Japanese theatre, and East Asian spiritual thought, was first developed in the late 1950s and 1960s through experimental collaborations led by founder Tatsumi Hijikata and his collaborators. Later on, women and female Butoh dancers that studied with Hijikata such as Yoko Ashikawa, Saga Kobayashi and Natsu Nakajima profoundly influenced the course of the art form and its development abroad. Their work established Butoh as disciplined and rigorous, yet spontaneous and idiosyncratic, intellectual and experimental, yet grounded in the human body. Instead of aspiring to an aesthetic ideal, Butoh reveals the primordial human being and the inner world. It implies total presence where dance is an expression of being in the world as well as containing the world within oneself. Butoh grows from themes such as dreams, ghosts, androgyny, nature and ecology, solitude, and the natural cycles of life and death.
ABOUT SALISH SEA BUTOH:
Salish Sea Butoh Festival is an annual dance & performance festival that takes place in Port Townsend, Washington to deepen the study and exploration of Japanese Butoh. The festival was originally co-founded in 2021 by Iván-Daniel Espinosa, and it has quickly grown to become one of the largest active Butoh festivals in the United States with a robust teaching artist lineup of renowned Japanese teachers from the senior generation of Butoh. Now in its fifth year, Salish Sea Butoh continues to be the only artistic organization consistently bringing international Butoh artists to the Olympic Peninsula and producing an annual festival that features both guest artists from overseas and regional performers from the Pacific Northwest.