Hosted by Human Clay CIC
Workshops are conceived as sites of ceremony and deep listening and are rooted in the ethos of Butoh dance and the transformative potential of ritual practice. We attempt to hold gatherings as thresholds, a place where the visible and invisible meet, where the body becomes a vessel for myth, memory, and elemental presence.
Grounded in eco-somatic inquiry, animist cosmologies, and the raw poetics of movement, these workshops unfold as rituals of dissolution and becoming. Participants are invited into a shared passage through slowness, silence, and the strange intelligence of the body where old forms are shed and new sensitivities emerge.
We enter through breath, sensation, and image. Sometimes we work with materials, paper, earth, words as extensions of our dreaming. Each session becomes a ceremony of inquiry, where decomposition, emergence, and more-than-human kinship are choreographed in real time.
The Butoh body is an ecosystem responding.
To slow down is to let the world recompose you.
In Butoh, the body is a terrain of multiplicity, it contains ghosts, animals, dust, weather, memory. The dancer becomes soil rather than subject. Butoh training begins with forgetting: forgetting habitual movement, identity, and narrative. This process mirrors the postactivist call to unlearn the reflexes of control and urgency.
In postactivism, this is called fugitivity, a stepping away from dominant ways of knowing.
In Butoh, it is called becoming empty, a willingness to enter the unknown body, to be moved by forces beyond comprehension.
To dance is to become the earth’s gesture of remembering itself.
Workshops are held monthly and biannually, in the UK and internationally. humanclaycic@gmail.com
Please join us at Workshop and/ or Jam
OCEAN TONGUE: a workshop on the shoreline, exploring the poetics of the ocean and its beings through ecological land-movement practices, butoh, and sensorial theatre.
Tap into ancient body memory to awaken liquid intelligence and become oceanic—to kinship with more-than-human oceanic beings.
Day 1: OCEAN TONGUE WORKSHOP
We will engage in guided scores, solo and group experiments, and site-responsive improvisations. Developing our sensorial imagination at the land-sea interface. We will tap into the liquid intelligence of our body, grow crustacean limbs, explore sensitivity of marine life and dreaming of aquatic body. We will work with synesthetic practices, translating sensual experience into movement, preparing sensorial landscapes and interactions, assembling, sculpting oceanic limbs and exoskeletal forms.
13.10 / 11am-5pm day workshop on the coast
Location: Ayrmer Cove, South Devon
We will send coordinates to our meeting prior to the date.
Cost: 60 gbp *including sculptural materials
Day 2: OCEAN TONGUE JAM
We will meet in studio for two hours of open Play/Jam. With sculptural props and structures we will evoke aquatic environment and facilitate transitioning into oceanic organisms.
The Jam will be open to public to join us in improvisation and play.
Soundscapes will be supported by Keiko Yamamoto.
15.10 / 18:00 - 20:00 Ocean Tongue Jam
Location: STUDIO 12, Town Mill Building, Mardle Way industrial estate, Buckfastleigh, TQ11 0AG.
Cost: on Donation (5-10gbp sliding scale)
*Jam participants are welcome to remain observers.
To register please send email to humanclaycic@gmail.com
Anna Kushnerova
Anna Kushnerova is a performance, visual artist, filmmaker, and director of Human Clay CIC, a Devon based community interest company working at the intersection of performance, ecology, and cultural heritage. Her work weaves movement, ritual, and material culture: sculpture and installation, with research grounded in deep ecology, animism, and speculative ethnography.
Trained in Butoh, social theatre, and somatic research, Anna develops site-responsive projects that invite participants into imaginative and symbolic exploration. She has worked with people of all ages and backgrounds, facilitating workshops and creative processes that reconnect communities with the poetic and subconscious dimensions of experience.
Zoë Binetti
www.zozotransistor.com
Zoë Binetti, aka zozo Transistor creates embodied interfaces between concert, installation and performance.
She holds an MA Contemporary Arts Practice from the Bern University of the Arts (HKB Switzerland), has been trained in music improvisation by grammy award winning cellist David Darling and has been educated internationally in Butoh, Physical Theatre, and Shiatsu therapy.
Starting with an artist residency at pIAR, Kumasi Ghana in 2021, Zoë has embarked on an artistic research in Sensorial Orchestration, resulting in zozoTransistor creating various polysensual experiences at an intersection between concert, performance and installation. Her second album, an experimental audio documentation of her performance Water Tekno, will be released in November 2025 with Prefermusic Label.
Please join us in June 2025.
Yumiko Yoshioka: dancer, choreographer, teacher, art director.
Born in Tokyo, 1953.
Since 1988 based in Berlin.
Yumiko was a former member of Ariadone in 1974, the first female Butoh company, founded by Carlotta Ikeda and Ko Murobushi. In 1978, she performed with Carlotta and Ko in Paris ” Le Dernier Eden- Porte de L’Au-Dela “, the very first Butoh performance to be presented in a public theater outside Japan. In 1988 she became a co-founder of tatoeba THÉÂTRE DANCE GROTESQUE with Minako Seki and delta RA’i in Berlin (1988 - 1996).
Between 1995 – 2015 she was a core member of TEN PEN CHii art labor, an interdisciplinary and experimental art formation as a dancer and a choreographer along with JoaXhim Manger (visual artist) and Zam Johnson (composer and musician) .
Since 2015, she has been working as a solo dancer and a choreographer.
She has also set up various collaborative projects across Europe such as “eX…it!, Dance eXchange Festival” at Schloss Bröllin in Germany, (the last one took place in 2019), dance projects with Gest-Azione, with Annalisa Maggiani from Italy; and dance creations with Rena Konstantaki from Greece. She has been a superviser of “Butoh Lab Camp” project in Romania since 2021.
Her workshop “Body Resonance, based on Organic Movement and Butoh” is invited to many countries across the world
www.yumiko-yoshioka.com
Body Resonance
Butoh and Organic Movement Workshop
“The main focus of this workshop is a conscious research of our body/mind/soul unification, so we can deeply enjoy the intrinsic process of metamorphosis in the spirit of dance.
Through a continuous exploration of our past collective memories, we can strike a vein of abundant creative resources, enriching the essence of our life.
The body is a receptacle of time.
Body resonance is a key to opening up the doors of an ever-changing world inside and outside of ourselves, which helps the body to unfold its secrets, holding them up until they shine and tremble.
Everything is in resonance with each other.
Through a dialogue with our body, we can learn to be moved by inner and outer forces, thus realising we are a part of the Universe.
A dance of metamorphosis inevitably appears.” Y.Y.
Workshop Details
Dates and Times:
17/06/25 14:00 - 18:00
18/06/25 13:30 - 17:30
19/06/25 13:30 - 17:30
Location:
STUDIO 6
DARTINGTON ESTATE
TOTNES TQ96EL ENGLAND
Cost:
120GBP
*Limited availability 5 concession places, first-served basis
Registration and Inquiry:
Anna Kushnerova
A.kushnerova@mac.com/humanclaycic@gmail.com
We invite you to create around a morethanhuman-size hole in the Earth within the wild landscape of Dartmoor Forest.
Through movement we will explore encountering, articulating, entering, re-forming via the instrument of our bodies. We will create rituals and develop acts in situe in response to the physicality of the landscape.
A devouring possibility for an end, a composting opportunity, a transformative decomposition, or a poetic annihilation of that which is redundant to the life on the Earths.
Becca Parkinson is an environmental movement artist, therapist and facilitator
www.movinglandscapes.org
Anna Kushnerova is a performance and visual artist, Butoh educator and practitioner.
www.annakushnerova.com
Date: 16th November 2024
Time: 10-5pm
Location:
Meeting @ Buckland-in-the-Moor Community Hall
Opp St Peters Church
Newton Abbot
Devon
TQ13 7EW
Cost: £30/£40/£50 depending on income
Lunch: £10 for soup or bring a packed lunch
Optional Sauna on wild stream: £15
Contact: becca@movinglandscapes.org/a.kushnerova@mac.com
*Please note we will be working with movement indoors and outdoors so please bring comfortable layers that you can move in. Also please being suitable shoes, warm clothes and waterproofs for working outdoors. Do wear clothes that you are happy to get messy and covered in soil.
Ken Mai is a Japanese international Butoh artist, yogi, choreographer, and teacher based in Helsinki, Finland. He has performed and taught in more than 30 countries. He studied with the legendary Butoh founder Kazuo Ohno and he was also a member of the Sub Rosa Butoh Company, which was connected to the Byakkosha Butoh Company at the beginning of the ’90s in Kyoto, Japan. At the same time, he was a member of a well-known Eguchi & Sumiko modern dance company (German expressionist dance) in Osaka, Japan. Before and while doing Butoh, he practiced Zen Meditation at a Zen Monastery in Kyoto, Japan for 16 years and at Sri Chinmoy Meditation Centre in Kyoto, Japan. His art is based on Butoh & The Sacred with his own creativity and combines his background with Theatre, Gymnastics, Martial arts, Modern dance, Opera, Zen, Gothic fashion, Myth, and Yoga Philosophy. He expresses profoundly the deep life, death of nature being, and pureness of love.
http://kenmaibutoh.blogspot.com/
https://www.instagram.com/kenmaibutoh/
Butoh Artist Ken Mai will be coming to Dartington, Devon, UK to give workshops on the Dartington Estate. An opportunity to learn directly from the Master Artist with many years of experience.
Location:
On the Dartington Hall Estate, @ Studio 6
Dates:
Friday July 19 (10am – 2pm)
Saturday July 20 (10am – 2pm)
Sunday July 21 (10am – 2pm)
“We practice purifying the body while gradually understanding the observation of the body (body, mind, breathing, sensation, emotion, and energy) through stillness and movement. Through these exercises, we adopt a method that leads to the stage of image and transformation. It also includes developing one's own creativity through experimental improvisation and various images.
The method also includes important aspects especially related to esoteric spirit.” Ken Mai
Cost:
£80/three days *limited concession places available for students and participants on low income.
To attend, please contact me on a.kushnerova@mac.com
PERFORMANCE
Ken Mai will perform his solo “Body Psalm/身体詩編/Shintaishihen” at ASHBURTON ARTS CENTRE
Tuesday July 22nd @7,30pm
* please book tickets via AAC
Ken Mai Butoh Solo - Body Psalm/身体詩編/Shintaishihen
Duration 50 min
Creation by Ken Mai
The Psalm is a part of the Old Testament, a collection of praiseworthy verses. However, although this work does not dance this psalm, it should be influenced spiritually. For the time being, this work focuses on the microcosm of the body, and is a creative work that attempts the process of manifestation with the artistic sense of being expressed and existing as the body listens to the poems and songs that emerge from the inside and becomes a dance in the space.
And soul, what emerges from inner memories and unconsciousness is expressed as movement, and the body is transformed, darkness, light, beauty and ugliness and life and death are intersected and metamorphosis to the body. It also touches on the eternity of love, depicting a flower-like purity that overflows from the soul as a Psalm.
Cabo de Gata, Almeria, Spain
April 13-18, 2025 held by www.lafraguabruta.com
Peeled Bodies, on Multiplicity of Being
This workshop emerges as a continuation of my research into the multiplicity of bodies—a choreographic and symbolic exploration of the layers that constitute our being.
We will work with duplicates of our bodies—tracing, cutting, peeling, discarding, reconfiguring. The body becomes self-referential, explorative, polyphonic—a shifting organism of skins, impressions, and echoes. A movement ritual where the self is both contained and porous, splitting and merging, dissolving and reassembling.
Inspired by the Vedic cosmology of the multiple sheaths (koshas)—annamaya (physical), pranamaya (vital), manomaya (mental), vijnanamaya (wisdom), and anandamaya (bliss)—we will engage in a practice of material and energetic doubling. What happens when we place our breath into a paper replica of ourselves? How do we move with the shadow of our own becoming?
The peeled red body—a symbol of exposure, vulnerability, and transformation—guides this inquiry. The thin membrane of paper echoes the ephemeral layers we inhabit and discard. Red—like raw flesh, like molten earth, like the pulse beneath the skin, like the invisible portal of the ultra red —becomes the threshold between embodiment and shedding, presence and dissolution.
Where are you, lying down on my side, in the corner of your garden, under my cover of mosses, waiting…
It has been two thousand years since I lay down for you.
Your breath could bring me back from the dead.
Can you, in me, be everything that you need to be?
I want to arrive but I don’t have a body in which to make an appearance.
I come from the ground, that is, from the front of the scene, into this intense garden. I come as a voyeur.
(Helen Cixous)
The Ritual of Adornment: Body Enhancements, Costume & Sculptural Extensions
please join us
@spazio.500
DANCE OF SPORES III Spazio '500 per le Arti
Residential dance research camp and performance creation
23rd July - 3rd August 2024
Palazzo Malfatti, Vigolo Vattaro, Italy
11 days, 6 teachers, 50 hours guided practice, free time to explore and integrate, professional dancers sharing their creative process, costume designer workshop, 2 performance events including your work-in-progress showcase and our artists in residence premier, dance movies, lectures and evening jams.
Teachers: Kea Tonetti and Tivitavi (Italy), Alexandra Wynne (Australia), Tejus Menon (India/Switzerland), Anna Kushnerova (UK), Darinka Pilári (Hungary), Rita Soma (Spain)
Venue: Palazzo Malfatti - home to Spazio’500 in Vigolo Vattaro, Trento.
A series of gatherings In and around Dartmoor National Park: moving & divining, listening to the offerings with a reverential imagination with care and curiosity for its landscapes, the voices of non-beings and beings.
Anna will guide drawing from Butoh methods, offering transformation through somatic poetry. “We will discover our deeper body artist in reverence to all sentient matter, explore ‘becoming’ animal and plant by accessing liquid intelligence of the body and its inner multidimensional Dance.
We will evoke and translate subconscious material via imagery into experience, creating ritual, and learning from philosophy of animism in Butoh.”
Becca will offer simple movement scores and rituals to ground us physical embodied kinship with the wonders of the earth body. We will open the gateway of our senses; awakening the movement of our inner landscape as we listen and move with the language of the wild.
Anna Kushnerova is a Butoh performance and visual artist. Anna has presented in numerous international shows. Her performances are a blend of dance, costume, sculpture and sound. Often working with ritual and ceremony her practice resulted in many dance pieces and videos, which are site responsive and improvised in nature. Collaborating with artists from diverse disciplines has given her a broad approach to her movement practice. https://annakushnerova.com/
Becca Parkinson is an Open Floor Teacher, Environmental Movement and Arts Psychotherapist and artist. They have studied with Helen Ponor in non-stylised environmental movement and hold an MA in Dance Movement Psychotherapy. Their work explores physical encounters between the human body and the earth body while working with movement, soundscapes, ritual, performance, arts, and healing practices. Their work draws on queer ecology perspectives, and is curious to how immersive and sensate encounters in the natural environment enlivens possibility, fluidity, diversity of being, and movement beyond binaries; transforming embodied scripts. They have a deep love of the wild, feeling most at home amongst the granite, waters, moss and trees of Dartmoor.
www.movinglandscapes.org