Shoshana is a Butoh and movement artist, teacher, curator and presenter for Butoh Programming in San Francisco.
Her programming is dedicated to the appreciation, education and contemporary movement of the Butoh art-form by offering public workshops and performances through collaborations with International and National Butoh Artists.
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Shoshana is an experimental artist using movement and image to study process, identity and relationships. She works with the body as a sculptural moving metaphor exploring non-verbal narratives that relate to quotidian, esoteric and sensorial content. Her work is inspired by the tradition of Japanese Ankoku Butoh. She is a teacher, performer, curator and presenter for Butoh programming in San Francisco.
Shoshana studied contemporary dance, Ballet and West African dance at University of Oregon and San Francisco State University. She draws from her studies with renown Butoh teachers, Vangeline, Diego Piñon, Katsura Kan, Semimaru-San (Sankai Juku), Natsu Nakajima, Akira Kasai, Tadashi Endo and Yumiko Yoshioka, Atsushi Takenouchi.
Performance history includes work with Katsura Kan, Vangeline, Natsu Nakajima, eX..it performance festival at the International Art Research Residency, Schloss Bröllin in Berlin, Germany. Shoshana has a Masters in Somatic Psychology and is a somatic practitioner and psychotherapist. To see Psychotherapist web-site click HERE
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Get in touch or view more about ButohSF Programming
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Events & Offerings
Explore Events and Offerings from Shoshana Green and ButohSF, or follow on social media for more
Going Deeper…
Shoshana is offering individual Butoh-inspired movement sessions
Individual movement sessions are an opportunity to go deeper into your practice. Direct witnessing and reflection in the context of a supportive space is a unique context for furthering your movement work and embodied inquiry. Individual sessions provide guidance from somatic and Butoh based teachings and are customized around your goals and intentions. Also appropriate to develop your performance work.
For inquiries, please email Shoshana: butohcontact@gmail.com
Photo by Erin Feller / Airy Waters
Frequent Collaborators
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Megan Nicely is an artist/scholar who approaches "butoh" as a somatic means for experimenting with choreographic problems and performance presence. She is interested in states of consciousness experienced through the physical body and its thinking processes. As a teacher, Megan seeks to bring others toward finding a sense of ease and alert presence in the body informed by anatomy, sensation, rigorous attention to detail, and actualization what has not yet been thought.
Megan began her studies in the early years of the San Francisco Butoh Festival with artists such as Akira Kasai, Yumiko Yoshioka, Saga Kobayashi, Setsuko Yamada, Katsura Kan, and Maureen Fleming, and at the Colorado Dance Festival with Eiko and Koma. She has also taken classes in Japan with Kazuo and Yoshito Ohno and Akiko Motofuji. Sh e performed with Akira Kasai in Exusiai, was a company member in Brechin Flournoy's Underbelly Dance Theater Beast, contributed to several projects with artist Leigh Evans, performed at Ex…it! Artist exchange in 2007, and in 2009 worked with Tadashi Endo and director Doris Dörrie on the opera Admeto, presented at the Edinburgh International Festival. She has also studied Noh Theater and Costuming and in addition to her studies in butoh also has a background in release-based dance techniques.
Her own work has been presented in the San Francisco and New York Butoh Festivals and her writing has been published in TDR, Choreographic Practices, Performance Research, and in the Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance (2018).
She is associate professor in performing arts at the University of San Francisco, whose program focuses on the arts and social justice.
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paige starling sorvillo (she/her/cis/queer) is an improvising choreographer equally valuing instantaneous surreptitious public choreographies and extensively researched/rehearsed works for stage, site and video. Her choreographic practices employ association games and translation practices to generate: minimalist duos with musicians; “image-games” with artist groups; choreographies for objects and humans; and multi-layered intermedia work. She less often defines a set of fixed movements, but rather offers a set of sensory, intellectual, visual or emotional instigations that generate energetic state(s), movement/body qualities, text, images and sound.
Her physical performance dialect is charged with emotional and energetic nuance influenced by deep study of Japanese Butoh dance, Noguchi training, Ruth Zaporah’s Action Theater, western contemporary dance forms, and a deep nerdy love for the study of anatomy and kinesiology. She has presented work throughout the bay area, in various US cities as well as internationally since 2001.
More on paige starling sorvillo and balsamic collective practices: www.blindsight.work/work
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Queer Artist, Born and Raised in Hawaii and Current San Francisco Resident [previously known as Angela Newsham]
Through wildlife rehabilitation and data research, Angela studied the instinctual nature and spherical understanding of space and time that birds of prey live by. They explore how our human bodies may have inhibitions to clear expression and what stories emerge from those spaces though performance art. They have trained extensively in Body-Mind Centering with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and Sonja Riket and in Butoh with Vangeline,Yumiko Yoshioka, Diego Pinon, Natsu Nakajima, Atsushi Takenouchi and Hiroko Komiya.
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Sara Zalek is a transdisciplinary artist, producer, and curator of situations and curious objects. Rooted in physical investigations of trauma, resilience, and transformation, their work is intimate, raw, poetic. They make performances into learning situations, workshops, and sensing environments to encourage thoughtful interpersonal connections.
Zalek performs often in both live and online situations; The City of Chicago named them an Esteemed Artist in 2022. Elastic Arts Foundation awarded them a Curatorial Grant in 2020 for Hot Mess! A hybrid performance event.They were a Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist in 2015, a 2017 3Arts Make a Wave Awardee, and Ragdale Foundation Fellow. They have performed and curated performances at the Chicago Cultural Center, High Concept Labs, Elastic Arts, Experimental Sound Studio, Links Hall, Lumpen Radio, dfbrl8r, Urban Guild in Kyoto, Japan, and so many more.
Through Butoh Curious, Zalek connects national and international teaching artists with Chicago art makers across genres in the independent and fringe arenas (including dance, butoh, physical theater, experimental and improvisational music). They create opportunities for positive communication and arts integration using workshops, performances, and conversations about personal and collective body.
Vangeline Mentor & Teacher
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Vangeline is a teacher, dancer, and choreographer specializing in Japanese butoh. She is the artistic director of the Vangeline Theater/New York Butoh Institute (New York), a dance company firmly rooted in the tradition of Japanese butoh while carrying it into the twenty-first century.
Her work as an educator, choreographer, and curator has been supported by The National Endowment for the Arts, Japan Foundation, New York Department of Cultural Affairs, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York Council on the Arts, Robert Friedman Foundation, and Asian American Arts Alliance. Vangeline’s work has been heralded in publications such as the New York Times (“captivating”) and Los Angeles Times (“moves with the clockwork deliberation of a practiced Japanese Butoh artist”) to name a few. www.vangeline.com
Connect
Contact butohcontact@gmail.com or send a message here
Photo by Mer Al Dao from When Your Skin Calls You Home