Butoh Dance Performance: The Inside is not Different than the Outside

Event Type
Performance
Event Description

Spend the evening awake in your senses with three visceral Butoh performances by Jon Poindexter, Sara Zalek, and Holly Chernobyl.

Sara Zalek:
In the vast and historic Museum of Surgical Science, your very insides will sing with Sara Zalek’s roaming performance, Gold Test: Intestine.

This is from a series of improvisations on reflection, repair, and cyborgs. Inspired by Tatsumi Hijikata (founder of Butoh) and David Cronenberg (sci-fi filmmaker)

In this work, I explore relationships between metal and body, iteration and instance, presence and absence. There will be both sound and movement created in the moment which aim to question the meaning of our lives together in the moment of creation. This performance suggests a story rather than narrates one -- I invite the viewers to find their own relevance and meaning in the work. I aim to create mythologies which question the nature of how stories are created and reiterated, and examine our human condition to search for the magic elixir.

Holly Chernobyl:
A spirit of ice, plastic, and a strange hypothetical future watches you. You in turn watch the spirit, as all are surveilled in the Hall of the Immortals by ghosts of the past in Holly Chernobyl’s BODYCRAFT: every.word.for.cold.

Call us doll-like, plastic. Can’t you feel time pressing? We can’t. We remain static, decomposing over centuries, millennia.
Freeze--they won’t know your mind. Freeze--they won’t know what comes next. Stillness is a weapon.
Twisting, we shape ourselves into objects static and moving simultaneously.
We are an idea and a manifestation.

Jon Poindexter:
Traverse the San Jiao meridian with Jon Poindexter in his new multi-media and interactive performance piece, revolving around healing and Chinese medicine.

The San Jiao Performance uses sound as a means to activate the meridian. Movements stimulating these functions will be danced, and the audience invited to join in the healing dance.

The San Jiao is a controversial and somewhat esoteric meridian within the system of Chinese medicine. The San Jiao is not an organ, rather it is a path through the body which transports energy to influence functioning.

Running Time
2 hours
Dance Styles
Modern / Contemporary
Multi-disciplinary

Location

International Museum of Surgical Science

1524 North Lake Shore Drive
Chicago, IL 60610

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