The New York Butoh Institute and Howl! Happening are now receiving applications to perform in our Queer Butoh Festival, October 19, 2017.

Queer Butoh is an evening of site-specific Butoh performance and community discussion with LGBTQ Butoh artists, or artists influenced by Butoh. For this year's Queer Butoh, participants will perform a fluid, durational, site specific and improvised butoh performance between 6:30pm and 9pm on Thursday, October 19, 2017 at Howl! Happening in New York City.

This year, we are so lucky to be able to perform in a sculpture installation by Japanese Artist Mazao Gozu.

There will be no clear-cut separation between audiences and performers. Performers will be asked to sometimes take breaks and mingle/have conversations with the audience. We are opening a fluid space of interaction between audiences and LGBTQ Butoh performers.

In Butoh, the desire to play with notions of both "masculine" and "feminine" has been expressed in performance methodology by both male and female artists. At its origin, the introduction of Butoh in Japan was widely controversial. The first Butoh performance, Kinjiki (Forbidden Colors) created by Tatsumi Hijikata in 1958, caused shock amongst its spectators. Inspired by the work of homosexual author Jean Genet, Kinjiki took its name and inspiration from Yukio Mishima's book Forbidden Color and dealt with homosexuality, a profoundly taboo subject at the time. Today, butoh remains a place of acceptance for “otherness”.

At Howl! Happening

6 E 1st St

New York, NY

To apply, applicants should email us at butohinstitute@gmail.com:

-a short video of themselves performing a site specific butoh installation

-AND a candid audio or video statement to, explaining how butoh may have been instrumental in articulating, or facing the unique challenges they face as LGBTQ artists.

We are not looking for “theatrical performances”, but looking for examples of minimal butoh performances by butoh artists who are able to integrate with a site-specific environment.

As part of the soundscape for the installation, we will play candid/conversational audio recordings from the dancers speaking about their life experiences, and their experience with butoh.

We will accept submission until June 30th, 2017

Results will be announced by August 1st, 2017.