Vangeline Theater/ New York Butoh Institute resumes in-person butoh classes February 5th–plus online, and on-demand classes offered

Vangeline Theater/ New York Butoh Institute resumes in-person butoh classes February 5th–plus online and on-demand butoh classes

Vangeline Theater/ New York Butoh is happy to resume in-person butoh classes and workshops in New York, starting February 5, 2022. Online classes will continue to be offered via Zoom; we are also excited to expand our on-demand roster of butoh classes and workshops on Vimeo.

Join us, in-person, online via Zoom, or practice butoh on your own time with our popular on-demand classes and workshops. Classes are taught by butoh dancer and expert Vangeline.

For a calendar of in-person and online butoh classes, visit www.vangeline.com/calendar.

To take our butoh classes on-demand, visit www.vangeline.com/on-demand-classes.

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Vangeline Theater/ New York Butoh Institute is dedicated to the advancement of butoh in the 21st century, With 20 years of experience in the field, we pride ourselves on making butoh dance accessible to complete beginners, actors, dancers, and students from all walks of life.

The Vangeline Theater does not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identification. Our classes are open to everyone interested in studying butoh. We welcome students with disabilities. Our classes are trauma-informed, open level, and beginners are welcome.

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. 

Vangeline is the founder of the New York Butoh Institute Festival, which elevates the visibility of women in butoh, and the festival Queer Butoh. She pioneered the award-winning, 15-year running program The Dream a Dream Project, bringing butoh dance to incarcerated men and women at correctional facilities across New York State. Her choreographed works have been performed in Chile, Hong Kong, Germany, Denmark, France, the UK, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. 

She won a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Dance Award. She is also a 2018 NYFA/NYSCA Artist Fellow in Choreography for Elsewhere ; the winner of the 2015 Gibney Dance Social Action Award as well as the 2019 Janet Arnold Award from the Society of Antiquaries of London. 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. 

Widely regarded as an expert in her field, Vangeline has taught at Cornell University, New York University, Brooklyn College, CUNY, Sarah Lawrence, and Princeton University (Princeton Atelier). Film projects include a starring role alongside actors James Franco and Winona Ryder in the feature film by director Jay Anania, ‘The Letter” (2012-Lionsgate).                     

In recent years, she has been commissioned by triple Grammy Award-winning artists Esperanza Spalding, Skrillex, and David J. (Bauhaus). She is the author of the critically-acclaimed book: Butoh: Cradling Empty Space, which explores the intersection of butoh and neuroscience. Her work is the subject of CNN’s “Great Big Story” “Learning to Dance with your Demons.” She is soon to be featured on the BBC in Dessa Darling’s show Deeply Human.

www.vangeline.com

Photos by Marco Poolamets.

Village Voice Exclusive: Vangeline Theater and Leverage Models in "Senators"

Exclusive: Leverage Models Bring Butoh to the Table in "Senators"

Monday, May 2, 2016 at 3:30 p.m.

By By Lindsey Rhoades

http://www.villagevoice.com/music/exclusive-leverage-models-bring-butoh-to-the-table-in-senators-8575988

Leverage Models' Alena Spanger (L) and Shannon Fields

Seeing Leverage Models live is like watching a fireworks display. Frontman Shannon Fields is a powder keg of nervous energy, belting words through a megaphone, jangling a tambourine, and flailing through the crowd. He doesn’t dance so much as combust. The unbridled gusto is partially inspired by the tent revivals Fields attended in his youth, where worshippers spoke in tongues. "I have nothing to do with that belief system anymore," he says, "[but] there’s something physically and emotionally that I carry with me, kind of my default mode."

Fields’s exodus from the faith involved an element most don’t: butoh. Isolated in a deeply religious Pentecostal community, a teenage Fields came across photos of pioneering performer Tanaka Min in a Japanese magazine he was using for a school assignment. Tanaka wore little but white body paint, contorting his vulnerable body in public spaces. "It felt like looking at a kind of porn," but without the guilt and shame that his upbringing attached to desire, says Fields. "I felt embarrassed and confused and excited by it. Not sexually, but artistically. My imagination went supernova."

Butoh is how Fields learned art could use abstraction to reach emotional truth, but its influence on Leverage Models has not been explicit — until today. The Village Voice is pleased to post the exclusive premiere of the band’s video for their new song “Senators,” which features choreography from butoh performer Vangeline France.

"Senators" began as a way for Fields to confront his discomfort in social situations. He observed the transactional, getting-to-know-you conversations going on around him and started writing snippets of dialogue, which he turned into disjointed lyrics. "I’m paralyzed by small talk, and interested and fascinated in it because of that," he says. "There’s something obviously political about that [transactional] way of having a conversation. That simple, declarative language seemed like the language of government, the language of business – powerful, direct."

This image of polished professionals became the inspiration for the "Senators" video. As he was falling asleep one night, Fields envisioned himself and Alena Spanger, the other singer in "Senators," in an exaggerated debate. "People in a business negation use control in their facial expressions and bodies to project power," says Fields. "All of a sudden I thought, 'Oh, this is butoh!' — the way that form of dance abstracts the body and finds a sort of dream logic."

But Fields didn’t know any performers, so a friend connected him with Vangeline, a French-American butoh dancer. Like Fields, she came to butoh unexpectedly, when a friend took her to BAM to see internationally renowned butoh troupe Sankai Juku. Butoh’s acknowledgement of darkness spoke to her. "We all have [primitive] energies inside of us, [but] most of us have been socialized to repress them," Vangeline says. "In butoh we give them an arbitrary expression…. We’re giving a voice to the Genie in the bottle, and then [putting] it back in."

To make the video, Vangeline and one of her principal dancers, Azumi, worked through long takes to keep their almost imperceptible movements authentic despite wearing the less-than-authentic costume of contemporary business suits. Their tension mirrors the stilted mannerisms of family dinners or first dates, and as the video progresses, flickers of surreal, traditional butoh encroach upon this modern scene, all gnarled limbs and ashen makeup. This is the brilliance of the video: It reflects the sinister, or at least uncomfortable, truths that can lie just beneath the surface of our social interactions. Both butoh and the song itself operate on subconscious levels, and if neither makes sense at first, the merging of Fields’s and Vangeline’s mediums brings the purpose of both into sharp focus.

It was a collaboration of like-minded artists. "He pushes himself to the limit of what is socially acceptable," Vangeline says of Fields’s unbridled performance style, which is visually the polar opposite of butoh but philosophically similar. "There’s something in him that is fearless; he doesn’t mind making himself uncomfortable. That’s such an important part of the work that we do – we have to be willing to be uncomfortable."

Leverage Models DJ at Good Room on May 3. Click here for more information and ticket