BUTOH PANEL DEMONSTRATION

AT THE MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER/CUNY's GRADUATE CENTER
(365 Fifth Avenue, web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc)
October 18 (Tuesday) at 6:30pm
Reservations: 212-817-8215 or [email protected]
Cost: FREE, but please reserve, space is limited; see the MESTC website

Held in conjunction with the The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, this evening serves as an introduction to and an in depth dialogue on butoh. Selections from rare butoh dance videos will be shown to illustrate the work of the early founders of the form. Butoh artists from the festival will show video clips of their work and discuss the complex nature of their choreographic process. The panelists - including festival artists and several prominent dance/theatre scholars -- will explore and re-evaluate the current state of butoh and examine the future of this international and constantly evolving art form.

Earlier this day, is a Master Class by Festival Artist Yuko Kaseki. See Workshops for more information.

Co-Presented with The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at The Graduate Center, The City University of New York.

Panelists include:

Dance/Theatre Scholars:
André Lepecki
  Assistant Professor at the Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts/NYU
Mark Franko
  Professor at the Theater Arts Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz
Carol Martin
  Associate Professor at the Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts/NYU

Festival Artists:
Yuko Kaseki
Kan Katsura

Moderated by Jeff Janisheski, New York Butoh Festival co-founder/co-director

André Lepecki (Brazil, 1965) is an essayist, dramaturg, and critic based in New York. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. André Lepecki has lectured on performance and dance studies throughout Europe and the US. He has received research grants from the Gulbenkian Foundation, the Luso-American Foundation, the Portuguese National Institute for Scientific Research, and the Rockefeller Foundation as a member of the think tank "Conversations in Choreography." As dramaturg, he worked with choreographers Vera Mantero, Francisco Camacho, and between 1992-1998 with Meg Stuart and Damaged Goods. He co-directed with Bruce Mau the installation STRESS for the Wiener Festwochen 2000. André Lepecki's writings on dance and performance studies have been published in numerous publications in the US, Europe and Brazil including Performance Research (UK), The Drama Review (US), Art Forum (US), Nouvelles de Danse (Belgium), Protée (Canada). He is editor of Of the Presence of the Body: dance and critical theory (Wesleyan UP, forthcoming) and co-editor with Sally Banes of The Senses in Performance (Routledge, forthcoming). He is currently working on a book on "still acts" in contemporary European performance, and on a new installation project with director Rachael Swain to be opened in Sydney in November 2002.

Mark Franko is a Professor at the Theater Arts Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of The Work of Dance: Labor, Movement, and Identity in the 1930's (Stanford University Press, forthcoming), Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics, Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body, and The Dancing Body in Renaissance Choreography. He is the co-editor of Acting on the Past: Historical Performance Across the Disciplines. His articles on dance and performance have appeared in Discourse, PMLA, The Drama Review, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, Theatre Journal, and in numerous anthologies. Mark Franko has maintained a unique dance career bridging and intertwining practice and theory. He and his company, NovAntiqua, have been performing in the United States and abroad since 1985. Franko's dancing background is diverse: he began his dance career with Paul Sanasardo Dance Company, later appeared in classical repertory, as well as in Oskar Schlemmer's "Bauhaus Dances" under the direction of Debra McCall.

Carol Martin: Awards include: De La Torre Bueno honorable mention for Dance Marathons: Performing American Culture of the 1920s and 1930s; Best Issue of the Year by Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers for a special issue of the journal TDR on Japanese Performance co-edited with Nanako Kurihara; Fulbright; NEH summer seminar on the making of modern America; Mellon, Cornell University; Tisch Senior Faculty Development grants; NYU Humanities Council Grant. Books: Brecht Sourcebook; A Sourcebook of Feminist Theatre: On and Beyond the Stage; and Dance Marathons: Performing American Culture of the 1920s and 1930s. Martin's essays and interviews have appeared in several journals and anthologies, including the New York Times, and have been translated in French, Polish, Chinese, and Italian. She has lectured in Singapore, Shanghai, Japan, and Germany, as well as been a participant at Eugenio Barba's International School of Theatre Anthropology. Martin has been an academic specialist on the American History channel, and British BBC radio. She was the historical consultant for the Broadway production of Steel Peer with music by Kander and Ebb. She has taught at Dartmouth, Florida State University, California State University, and City College. Her current work is on American documentary theatre.

Jeff Janisheski is co-founder/co-director and co-curator of the New York Butoh Festival. Jeff first started performing butoh in 1989 when he trained with two of Tatsumi Hijikata's main performers - Natsu Nakajima and Yukio Waguri - and performed with them at La Mama, NY. He then moved to Tokyo where he trained intensively for three years in both butoh (with butoh co-founder Kazuo Ohno) and traditional noh theatre (with Richard Emmert, a certified Kita Noh school teacher). In New York and Tokyo, Jeff has directed, choreographed and performed dozens of dance-theatre pieces that bridge butoh and noh and bring in elements from his training in theatre and visual art. Jeff is Artistic Associate and Director of Education and Outreach at the Off-Broadway theatre Classic Stage Company, where he co-curates the On the Verge series of late-night experimental programming. He was an adjunct faculty member teaching butoh at Fordham University's Theatre Department and has lectured and taught workshops on butoh, noh and Viewpoints at numerous colleges, including: Amherst College, Manhattanville College, Mt. Holyoke College, The New School, New York University, Purchase College, Smith College, Williams College and the University of Massachusetts. He currently is adjunct faculty in the Department of Speech and Drama at Dowling College.