A Breakdown of Butoh

A Breakdown of Butoh

150 150 Ventnor Fringe

An introduction to butoh as a dance form with Ezio Tangini. Check out Eio’s show Somewhere Nowhere at The Scout Hut, 9.30pm & 10.30pm Thursday evening (18+).

Where are you from?

“Rome, Italy”

How did you hear about Ventnor Fringe?

“On the web”

What style of performance is yours?

“The butoh dance is born in Japan in 1959, Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno have been the discoverers of this new kind of dance.

Now this form of dance is known everywhere. It is a form of dance in which it is important to feel the internal motivations. The Body expressing its existence. Living. Body. Inner-landscapes.”

Who/what inspires your choreography?

“The nature is often the most important inspiration. In Somewhere Nowhere the nature has inspired me strongly and also pictures, like the paintings of Andrea Mantegna and Hans Holbein the young.” 

How many years have you been perfecting this art? 

“I started studying butoh in 1998 with Masaki Iwana, in an intensive summer one month training in Normandy. Then I was there several times.

I started performing butoh in 2003. Flavia Ghisalberti, Yann van Steenbrugghe and I founded the group In Between Butoh. The group has been created around the dance project “Something in between”; reflections about the socialization of madness and the memories of places which accompanies it, conditions it or treats it.”

What other countries have you performed in? 

“With In Between Butoh; I performed in Russia, U.S., Canada, France, Switzerland, Germany, Gibraltar and Romania.

As as solo performer I’ve performed in Holland, Ireland, Romania and Switzerland.”

Where is the most interesting place you’ve ever performed? 

“In Sibiu (Romania) in 2009 with In Between Butoh. We performed as a three piece with a musician, Frank Heierli, in a small boat on an artificial lake, inside the Astra Museum and park with 400 people watching our performance.”