QUEER BUTOH 2022
PRESENTS

Butoh/King Workshop with Hélène Barrier

 HYBRID CLASS!

BOTH ONLINE VIA ZOOM AND IN PERSON AT

Vangeline Theater Studios

126 10th Street

Brooklyn NY 11215

F/G/R to 4th Avenue

Saturday, June 25, 2022

12-5pm

Fees: $50

ONLINE STUDENTS, PLEASE SEND AN EMAIL TO BUTOHINSTITUTE@GMAIL.COM TO LET US KNOW YOU ARE JOINING VIA ZOOM!

During this workshop two practices are brought together by a singular ascertainment:

To move through and beyond genders, pushing further from simple crossdressing, we need to work on our corporeality, how we inhabit our bodies.

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. Masculinity is shown as a learned behavior, a political choreography, an “improvisation within a Scene of Constraint” (J.Butler).

Participants will experience how the performance of masculinity changes a person's status within the social space, from freedom of movement to access to speech.

 The main objectives are:

Showing that genders are social and political constructs.

Experiencing new forms of political actions through the subversive use of stereotypical masculine traits and behaviors.

Building a safe and empowering collective space.

Butoh dancing is at its core a practice of metamorphosis and embodiment. It offers a set of tools to discover and deepen one’s ability of transformation.

This part of the workshop will start with a basic warm up and simple exercises aiming at a stronger awareness of one's body and its surroundings. This awareness will expand to other people’s presence in the room, effectively building a sense of togetherness.

The work will then focus on exploring the body layer by layer: bone structure, organs, flesh, skin, hair.

Finally the participants will be invited to freely inhabit the space around them in an instinctive, animal-like kind of way.

At the end of the workshop Drag Kings will have the opportunity to collectively experiment their deconstructed and newly-formed masculinities in public spaces around the studio.

Bring drag costume with you!

Hélène Barrier

Textile designer, performer and self-taught artist, Hélène BARRIER grounds her work in a slow meditative-like practice, unraveling polymorphic echoes of her environment.

Fascinated by social insects and their intricate shelters, her work has taken many forms: textile installations, drawings and sculpture. She is also a Butoh dancer. Dance is a place of perpetual metamorphosis, where one is constantly searching for new paths to follow. It allows her to slip into all materials, into all skins, and depending on the place, to adapt her dance to the

environment or to resonate with other works, as during her solo with Brancusi’s The Endless Column at the Centre Pompidou. For several years now, she has been developing Butoh and drag king workshops, real moments of sharing and empowerment, with the complicity of the Jerk off festival and the Point Ephémère in Paris. Her works cross gender and animality, ecology and difference, respect for the other and the territory. She defines herself today as a citizen artist, claiming from the beginning an eco-feminist approach, anchored in transmission.