Vangeline Theater/ New York Butoh Institute collaborates with The Brick to present the sixth annual Queer Butoh 2022, available online from June 1-30, 2022 and in-person from June 28-30, 2022 at 8pm at The Brick, 579 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn.

Online performances will be available to screen on-demand beginning June 1 at 8pm ET at www.vimeo.com/vangeline. The programming features Born to Transform with Fer Zam (Mexico); Yarli &Yin’s short film Wrestling Blues (Hong Kong/United Kingdom) with butoh dancer Mavi Haro; and Shadowbloom with Xue and Merwin Wong (Singapore).

The in-person performances will be June 28-30, 2022 at 8pm at The Brick. Tickets are $20 and available for purchase at https://www.bricktheater.com/event/queer-butoh-2022/2022-06-28/. The performances will feature XUE and Merwin Wong (Singapore) in shadowbloom, Hélène Barrier (France) in METAGENDER, and Dustin Maxell (New York) with Kayva Yang and Mei Maeda in in a dark forest partly illuminated. The running time is approximately two hours with intermission.

A Butoh/King workshop led by Hélène Barrier will be offered as part of the festival on June 25, 2022 at the Vangeline Theater/New York Butoh Institute studio in Brooklyn. This Drag King workshop uses queer feminist collective practices to explore performative masculinity and its various privileges, revealing the inner potential of political action through playfull deconstruction. More info/reservations at www.vangeline.com/calendar.

About the Pieces

in a dark forest partly illuminated is a new performance created by dustin maxwell. It is a mix of dance ritual and visual art, where the body is both object and subject sensing into the unknown; both sculpture and transceiver radio picking up messages from the void. It is an invitation to partake in the painpleasure of exposure, submerging into shadow and emerging exalted.

shadowbloom by Xue and Mervin Wong is a soft spiral into the uncanny. The work unearths quiet stirrings and subterranean memories.

META GENDER is the theatrical result of collective research centered on gender, body, music and performance deconstruction. It is born out of a commissioned work by the LUFF, the Lausanne Underground Festival in Switzerland. “The Contra-Sexual Manifesto,” reference text of the performance accompanies the butoh dance, which imposes on the viewer, from the start, incarnation / transgression of its “flesh suitcase” costume. It offers to the dancer a prosthetic body, which leaves everyone free of projecting their own body fantasy. Made of stockings and tights (polymorphic material malleable depending of the textures which it is filled with: cotton, foam, flour, beads, polystyrene beads), it reveals here and there another body, bloated, overloaded, hiding unexpected and unfinished movements. The costume becomes a new skin, cellulite, testicle, breast, penis and dildo.