New Ab/Normal - Forum #2
ButohOUT!2021
New Ab/Normal
新しい異常
Forum #2
ButohOUT! 2021 presents two forums in April and May. The second forum is on 23 April, inviting Australian Butoh/Body Weather artists, Lynne Bradley and Peter Fraser hosted by Melbourne-based Butoh practitioners Yumi Umiumare and Helen Smith.
Yumi Umiumare is one of Japanese/Austrailan's most renowned creative pioneers in the artform of Butoh. Together with Helen Smith, who completed a Research Masters investigating the Transformative Power of Butoh at Monash University, Forum #2 will explore how Australian Butoh continues to evolve in a post-pandemic era.
ButohOUT! 2021 will take place from Feb to May 2021 at Abbotsford Convent and Dancehouse in Melbourne. This year’s theme is New Ab/Normal exploring the notion of ‘what is normal?’ through the anarchic form of Butoh. Originally called Dance of Darkness, Butoh has always been associated with the marginalised, embracing the abnormal, odd, quirky and the deviant. One of the first Butoh performances so shocked its Japanese audiences that it was forced to go underground, yet now Butoh is accepted as an innovative and transformative art form. Conversely, what we used to think as ‘normal’ is no longer so. Instead, the term, 'new normal' exists, which contains the paradoxical nuance that an abnormality can become ‘normal’. We hang onto a semblance of normalcy like a security blanket - but why?
Profiles
Photo: GAIA by Zen Zen Zo Physical Theatre & Dairakudakan. Photography by Simon Woods
DR LYNNE BRADLEY
Dr Lynne Bradley has worked as a leader in the arts and education sectors for the past 30 years, and is currently the Artistic Director of the Horizon Arts Festival on the Sunshine Coast. After training in Noh and Butoh in Japan for 5 years in the late 80s and early 90s, she co-founded one of Australia’s first physical theatre companies, Zen Zen Zo, in 1992. Lynne’s speciality areas as a director include large-scale physical and visual theatre, as well as immersive, site-specific, and transcultural work. Lynne is also a leading actor-trainer in Australia, specialising in Butoh, the Suzuki Method and Viewpoints. She has worked extensively with the founders of these forms in Japan and the USA and travels regularly nationally and internationally to teach them. As a Butoh practitioner, Lynne trained with Ohno Kazuo, Katsura Kan, Iwashita Toru and Maro Akaji. Between 2006-2016 Zen Zen Zo and Dairakudakan engaged in a decade-long partnership of training and performance in both Japan and Australia. Lynne’s PhD on Cultural Translation focused on this relationship and investigated best-practice models for conducting cross-cultural and transcultural creative practice.
Horizon Festival: https://www.horizonfestival.com.au/
Facebook: @ZenZenZofPhysicalTheatre
Photo: Vic McEwan from his Shadowlands project at Narrandera
PETER FRASER
Peter Fraser does improvised and place-based dance: he likes to experience the body as an ecology. He performed extensively with DeQuinceyCo over almost 30 years, in extended desert-based projects, urban site-specific performance and black box dance. He co-founded the Environmental Performance Authority to make performance linking performers and audiences with their surroundings http://www.environmentalperformanceauthority.com .
Peter has worked in various performance modes (eg Deborah Hay's Solo Commissioning Project, Xavier Le Roy's exhibition/performance Temporary Title, Arjun Raina's The Magic Hour, involving Kathakali/Butoh/Body Weather - with Helen Smith) and in his own practice. Ongoing projects include: Sounds Like Movement, a quirky duo with instrument-maker/musician Dale Gorfinkel celebrating relationships between movement and sound https://soundslikemovement.tumblr.com/; DIRt: dance in regional disaster zones (Ros Crisp https://www.omeodance.com/dirt ), About Now authentic movement/improvisation (dir. Shaun McLeod); and Prophets ‘stylefree’ masked music group https://prophetsband.com/ . Recent projects include the award-winning dance video https://vimeo.com/user11525528 dir. Vanessa White. His recent theatre studies MA focused on Strategies for truthful performance.
Photo: Mifumi Obata
YUMI UMIUMARE
Yumi is an established Japanese Australian performance artist, Butoh dancer, choreographer, creating her distinctive style of works for 30 years. Her works are renowned for provoking visceral emotions and cultural identities. Her works are seen in numerous festivals throughout Australia, Japan, Europe, New Zealand, South East Asia and South America. Yumi has worked with many socially engaged theatre projects, with aboriginal and refugee communities, culturally diverse groups and inclusive dance and theatre companies. Yumi is a recipient of a fellowship from Australia Council (2015-16) and the winner of the Green Room Geoffrey Milne Memorial Award in 2017 in recognition of her contribution to Contemporary and Experimental Performance. Yumi is an artistic director of ButohOUT! Festival, activating local and international Butoh communities in Melbourne and teaches nationally and internationally. www.yumi.com.au
HELEN SMITH - Facilitator
Helen Smith is a physical theatre performer, teacher and director whose main influences have been Japanese-influenced artforms, including Butoh and Suzuki actor training.
As a member of Brisbane-based Physical Theatre company, Zen Zen Zo, she trained, performed nationally and internationally from 1993 to 2010. Helen’s first encounter with Butoh was in Kyoto in the 90s through Zen Zen Zo’s founder member, Lynne Bradley. Helen pursued her passion for Butoh for eight years, studying under several Tokyo-based, masters from the lineage of both Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, the two recognised creators of Butoh. Helen relocated from Brisbane to Melbourne in 2010 to pursue a Masters in Theatre Research at Monash University in which her thesis focused on the transformative power of Butoh.
WHEN
Sunday
23 May 2021
10am-11:30am
Melbourne/Sydney
Other Time Zones
8AM | KL, Malaysia
9AM | Tokyo
5PM | California – 22 May
8PM | NYC – 22 May
DURATION
90 mins (60 mins plus
30 mins Q&A)
WHERE
Zoom
COST
Free but Booking is essential