Vangeline Theater/ New York Butoh Institute and The Brick Theater present Queer Butoh 2025

Vangeline Theater/ New York Butoh Institute, in collaboration with The Brick, presents the ninth annual Queer Butoh from Wednesday, June 25 - Saturday, June 28, 2025 at 8pm at The Brick Theater, 579 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn. Tickets start at $25 and are available for purchase here.

The festival will feature Surface Area Dance Theater (UK) on June 25 +26 only; Ama (Cambodia/France), Alice Baldock (UK), Quentin Chaveriat (Belgium), and Juan Manuel (Mexico) June 25-28; and River Luna and New York Butoh Institute on June 27 + 28 only.

Queer Butoh Festival 2025

Embodied Visions: Painting, Dance, and Radical Transformation

This year’s Queer Butoh Festival invites audiences into a space where the painted image meets the moving body, and where adversity is not only acknowledged—but danced through and transcended.

Spanning intimate solos, collaborative rituals, and lush visual worlds, the 2025 edition draws inspiration from the brushstrokes of artists like Nerys Johnson, Leonora Carrington, and Shahryar Shahamat, whose works ignite new choreographic forms. In Down Amongst the Plants, painterly textures are transposed into motion; Leonora channels surrealist imagery into a queer, mythic dance of resistance; while Human on Human merges the visceral expressiveness of Butoh with the immediacy of live painting, creating a raw, evolving canvas of movement and color.

Beyond aesthetics, this year’s festival underscores Butoh’s radical potential as a tool for survival and reinvention. Whether confronting personal illness, political oppression, or the fragmented self, these performances reclaim the body as a site of healing and defiance. Works like They Who Invite and Dove of Dawn honor the cycles of destruction and rebirth central to Butoh’s origins—offering audiences visceral, transformative encounters.

At its core, Queer Butoh Festival 2025 is a celebration of queer embodiment, artistic hybridity, and the alchemical power of movement to make beauty from struggle, and freedom from form.

Down Amongst the Plants is inspired by the life and work of Welsh artist Nerys Johnson (1942-2001). Johnson's exploration of movement and transformation began with her studies of the similarities between human and plant forms. In the last two years of her life, she developed a specific compositional style, creating a series of small, brightly coloured watercolours.

Vangeline, from the New York Butoh Institute, was invited by Surface Area Dance theatre and North East Museums in the UK to visit the Nerys Johnson archive. In response to the archive, Vangeline choreographed a dance-for-camera piece, which Vangeline has since adapted into a live performance by Surface Area Dance Theatre.

Leonora by Quentin Chavariat is a performance inspired by Butoh dance and based on the story "Down Under" by surrealist painter and writer Leonora Carrington, that describes in detail her psychiatric internment in a Spanish institution following the arrest of her lover Max Ernst as an opponent of the Nazi regime. As a queer metamorphosis, Quentin is transformed during the performance into a fantastical Leonora and plunges into his hallucinations to inhabit a madness that is not only a delirium, but also the refusal of a specific political context (the rise of fascism) and a resilience in relation to an alienating psychiatric system. 

Dove Of Dawn by Ama. A delicate journey of a shadow collapsing through its spine, falling into the dark night of the soul, into death, only to be reborn with a breath. Slowly embracing its wounds, it rises like a sensual lotus, finding its wings. This Butoh piece explores resilience, individuation, and freedom, where shadow and light intertwine, inviting the full embrace of one’s being through the transformative power of movement.

Fruit of My Woman by Alice Baldock. In response to the suffocating pressures of 'straight time' (to get married, to have children, etc), a woman blurs the boundary between human, non-human, and celestial. Inspired by the short-story by Han Kang of the same name.

CHON by Juan Manuel is a piece inspired by the main elements that make up organic life on Earth. It shows, stage by stage, the materialization of life and the changes in matter that are part of any living being on this planet.

They Who Invite by River Luna: The 13th century Zen master Dōgen Zenji wrote, “In birth there is nothing but birth, and in death there is nothing but death. Accordingly, when birth comes, face and actualize birth, and when death comes, face and actualize death. Do not avoid them or desire them.” He also wrote, “Know that there are innumerable beings in yourself, where there is birth and there is death.” They Who Invite are the Japanese deities Izanami and Izanagi; among their stories, is a tale of a descent into the underworld. This piece is dedicated to River’s son, Kirby.

Human on Human--New York Butoh Institute. Choreographed by Vangeline and inspired by the eponymous work by Iranian Painter Shahryar Shahamat. Featuring Ever Bussey, Lila Klatz, Catherine Winger, Robyn Wong, Eric Lichtenstein and Shahryar Shahamat, Human on Human transforms the stage into a living artwork, fusing Butoh with the act of painting in real time.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Surface Area Dance Theatre, and Arts Council England.