This year’s Queer Butoh Festival invites audiences into a space where the painted image meets the moving body, and where adversity is not only acknowledged but danced through and transcended.
Spanning intimate solos, collaborative rituals and lush visual worlds, the 2025 edition draws inspiration from the brushstrokes of artists like Nerys Johnson, Leonora Carrington and Shahryar Shahamat, whose works ignite new choreographic forms. In Down Amongst the Plants, painterly textures are transposed into motion; Leonora channels surrealist imagery into a queer, mythic dance of resistance; while Human on Human merges the visceral expressiveness of Butoh with the immediacy of live painting, creating a raw, evolving canvas of movement and color.
But beyond aesthetics, this year’s festival underscores Butoh’s radical potential as a tool for survival and reinvention. Whether confronting personal illness, political oppression or the fragmented self, these performances reclaim the body as a site of healing and defiance. Works like They Who Invite and Dove of Dawn honor the cycles of destruction and rebirth central to Butoh’s origins—offering audiences visceral, transformative encounters.
