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MOBIUS PRESENTS
Boston Butoh and Performance Art Festival
The Boston Butoh and Performance Art Festival will be presented at the Boston Center for the Arts’ Plaza Theater from Thursday, April 24th through Sunday April 27th, 2025. The program is co-produced by Mobius and the Boston Center for the Arts. We are excited to debut the program for our second annual festival which includes a free film screening, 2 evenings and 1 matinee of performance and a butoh workshop. This builds on the success of our inaugural festival in 2019 in which we presented headlining artists Yuko Kaseki and Zack Fuller in collaboration with Emily Smith and Michael Evans at the Green Street Studios in Cambridge. We are proud to provide Boston audiences with the rare opportunity to dive deeply into these enigmatic avant-garde performance forms.
What is Butoh? What is Performance Art?
“The world’s dance started from standing, but mine started from not being able to stand,” Tatsumi Hijikata the founder of butoh, once said. His butoh showcased the leper, the diseased body; the “encounter with something in the body that has gone astray.”
Butoh first appeared in post-World War II Japan in 1959, under the collaboration of Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, "in the protective shadow of the 1950s and 1960s avant-garde". A key impetus of the art form was a reaction against the Japanese dance scene then, which Hijikata felt was overly based on imitating the West and following traditional styles like Noh. Thus, he sought to "turn away from the Western styles of dance, ballet and modern,” and to create a new aesthetic that embraced the "squat, earthbound physique... and the natural movements of the common folk". This desire found form in the early movement of "ankoku butō". The term means "dance of darkness". Rather than aspiring to an aesthetic ideal, the dance attempts to expose the joys and sorrows of life, exploring the most fundamental elements of physical and psychological existence. It crosses the boundaries between dance and theatre, creating a unique form of expression that engages, moves and intrigues.
From “Butoh: The Dance of Death and Disease” by William Andrews, Japan Times
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Mobius values innovation, vulnerability, artistic development, and non-hierarchical relationships of mutual respect among our members.
45 years of art, performance, and activism
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Mobius / 808 Infuse
Mobius presented five nights of live art at the BU 808 Gallery from June 12-16th 2014. Mobius/808 Infuse presented each artist with the substantial challenge of creating site-sensitive artworks for the 11,000 square foot gallery.
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Transactions I / Belfast
Transactions I was the first stage of an exchange between the Mobius Artists Group in Boston, USA and beyond in Belfast, IRE.
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Boston Butoh Festival
The Boston Butoh Festival is an annual event produced by Mobius that brings together renowned international, national and local butoh artists with audiences for performances, workshops and lectures.
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City Hall - Concrete Actions
The Mobius Artists Group is pleased to announce Concrete Actions, an evening of site-inspired original works responding to the striking concrete modernist design of City Hall and the democratic ideals that continue to animate it.
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Transactions II / Boston
Five Bbeyond artists traveled from Belfast, Ireland to Boston, joining 8 Mobius artists, to perform new works specifically designed for presentation in an outdoor, public venue.
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8x8 Choreographers/Composers
8x8 Choreographers/Composers was an evening-length program of new collaborative works by Boston and NYC-based artists presented by Mobius at the Judson Memorial Church in NYC and at Green Street Studios in Cambridge, MA
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Mobius / Quebec
Quebec/Boston Artistic exchange. Le Lieu, centre en art actuel (Les Éditions Intervention) in collaboration with Mobius (Cambridge).
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