Butoh Workshop with Yumino Seki

Where: MK Gallery, Milton Keynes

When: 1600-1800, August 3rd 2017

To Book: £10 per participant CLICK HERE TO BOOK

舞踏 Butoh is an avant-garde dance movement established in late 50s in post-war Japan. Influenced by German Expressionism self-identity was radically explored with culturally diverse concepts through bodily expression. The Somatic is the study of a ‘person’ as a living functional body. Integrating the body, mind and emotion whilst using movement as the main exploratory tool.

The workshop will take place as a precursor to MK Gallery's Scratch Night - Zaïmph, Caleb Madden with Yumino Seki and Bad Body which you can read more about by clicking here

Shifting attention from ‘action’ to ‘active listening’ we investigate unique individual expression. Aiming to embody movement, image and feeling state in dance.

Butoh’s concept proposes culturally diverse ways of seeing, which are often fundamental to our lives like life & death, desire and dark human nature. Butoh sees dance as a living process and it pushes the boundaries of what we already know. All welcome.

Yumino Seki is a Japanese Butoh practitioner and a certified somatic movement educator and therapist. She has been interested in the authenticity of the temporal body for many years resulting in many pieces, which are site responsive and improvised in nature. Collaborating with artists from diverse disciplines has given her a broad approach to her movement practice. Since 1999 she has trained and worked in Butoh predominately with Tadashi Endo (Mamu Dance Theatre), Yumiko Yoshioka (Ten-Pen-Chii) both in Germany and Carlotta Ikeda (Ariadone) in France. In 2007, her particularly quest for sensory experience as an artistic expression took her forward to study VMI Somatic Practice with Patricia Bardi in Amsterdam. Seki's work is informed by the cultural depth and diversity of both the UK and Japan. Her development in her movement has been a gradual exploration of both her collective and self-identity.

‘My work starts from trust; trusting that the body has its own intelligence & experience. Not moving but being moved. Raw yet subtle, meditative yet self-destructive, stark yet sensual. Conflict and harmony co-exist in an ambiguous way. I explore and reflect the inner self where the body becomes mere ‘being’ and where a point of transformation occurs.'