Join us for a very special weekend of Live theatrical performances in downtown Port Townsend celebrating the unique artform of Japanese Butoh, a unique form of avant-garde dance-theater known for its striking physicality and powerful themes of transformation, dreams, spirits, and connection to nature . The advent of Butoh (舞踏, Butō) in 1960’s Tokyo was a major innovation in 20th-century dance and performance, not only in Japan but around the world. This event is a production of the 2026 Salish Sea Butoh Festival in Port Townsend, Washington in celebration of our festival's 6-year anniversary. This show highlights veteran Japanese performers of the 1st and 2nd generation of Butoh in the lineage of its founders Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, along with 3rd and 4th generation Butoh artists from all over Japan and the United States performing on the same stage.

* FRIDAY, July 31 — MainStage Performance # 1

8:00 PM – Doors open

8:15 PM to 10:15 PM – showtime

Artist LINEUP for MAINSTAGE PERFORMANCE Night # 1

• EMIKO AGATSUMA (Tokyo, Japan)
• Iván Espinosa & Company with Live music by Katinka Kleijn
• – INTERMISSION –
• YUMIKO YOSHIOKA (Tokyo/Berlin, Germany)

* SATURDAY, August 1st — MainStage Performance # 2

8:00 PM – Doors open

8:15 PM to 10:15 PM – showtime

Artist LINEUP for MAINSTAGE PERFORMANCE Night # 2

• MŌE YAMAMOTO and KEI SHIRASAKA (Kanazawa, Japan)
• – INTERMISSION –
• AKIRA KASAI (Tokyo, Japan)

$25 general admission | BUY YOUR TICKETS FOR THE SHOW at:

https://www.givebutter.com/salishseabutoh2026

* SUNDAY, August 2 — MainStage Performance # 3

8:00 PM – Doors open

8:15 PM to 10:15 PM – showtime

Artist LINEUP for MAINSTAGE PERFORMANCE Night # 3

• JOAN LAAGE/KOGUT BUTOH
• MITSUTAKE KASAI from Tokyo, Japan
• – INTERMISSION –
• KOTA YAMAZAKI & MINA NISHIMURA from Tokyo, Japan

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 its chief founder and architect Tatsumi Hijikata. Later on, women and female Butoh dancers that studied with Hijikata such as Yoko Ashikawa, Saga Kobayashi and Natsu Nakajima -- as well as pioneering Japanese dancers like Kazuo Ohno and Akira Kasai -- profoundly influenced the course of the art form and its development abroad. Hijikata and his collaborators established Butoh as a dance form that is disciplined and rigorous yet spontaneous and idiosyncratic, intellectual and experimental while 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 Cosmo Rapaport. Under Espinosa's leadership, 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 sixth 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 Japanese guest artists from overseas and regional performers from the Pacific Northwest.