Butoh Changed Everything dance film

Butoh Changed Everything dance film

MpowerDance Project’s latest film, “Butoh Changed Everything” is currently under consideration for over a dozen dance film festivals, including “San Francisco Dance Festival,” “Santa Fe International Film Festival” and “LA Independent Women Film Awards.”

 

Imbued with our decades of artistic research and development, this short film educates the dance community. It celebrates the San Francisco Global Butoh Festival as an event that cracked open the avant garde egg for dance art and performance. "Butoh Changed Everything" stretches the imaginative process in the treatment of dance film. It explores the artistic tension between resistance and acceptance toward both the human fetal state and the nature of change itself. "Butoh Changed Everything" remains calm while flexing with the power of change. It creates space for the Unknown, explores the concept of the Void and highlights internal centers for choreography beyond passion. 

 

 

These “Bay Area Dance Week” offerings and the film festival journey of “Butoh Chaned Everything” epitomize MpowerDance Project’s “GDP 2025: Cloud Woman Calls the Dance.”

Water Shapes Rock, Outdoor Butoh Dance Classes

 Water Shapes Rock, Outdoor Butoh Dance Classes 

In this moment, our planet, our species, our nation are all facing great peril. We are being challenged in unprecedented ways, both individually and collectively. Therefore, it is imperative to dance. To dance for joy as well as sorrow, to dance for both grief AND hope, to perform the dances of sanity, of empathy and of will. After all, dance articulates all of that for which there are no words. Indeed, dance is a mystical language, non-verbal and somatic, and yes, Butoh is the dialect of the inexpressible and unspeakable. 

Let us explore this powerful moment together.

 

As part of Bay Area Dance Week, Mary Power and the MPOWERDANCE Project are offering FREE outdoor dance classes in San Francisco, CA:

'Water Shapes Rock; Outdoor Butoh Improvisation'

Monday, April 28, 2025

Thursday, May 1, 2025

12 pm to 1 pm PDT

Class size is limited. Please Register through Bopsidy by clicking date of event. 

These “Bay Area Dance Week” offerings and the film festival journey of “Butoh Changed Everything” epitomize MpowerDance Project’s “GDP 2025: Cloud Woman Calls the Dance.”

GDP 2025: Cloud Woman Calls the Dance

 GDP 2025: Cloud Woman Calls the Dance

Listen. Together.

Talk. Together.

Dance On. The Tightrope.

Defy Gravity.

Noticing my feet, my ankles, where nerves retract out of fear, curling my toes away from the outer wall in my shoes. Shoes that speak of great support for the model foot without housing one. I am one of the lucky to have shoes, to run and skip turn in. Undeniably the real sense of relief, bare feet in the soft green not-yet-spring grass, feeling energy move my toes, flow right through the tassel of my ankles. The ground reaction force softly circulating bones and viscera, connecting this earthling body to the source, earth contents, to extracellular matrices, interstitial pressures. I connect like mycorrhizae fungi connects over and through the sensual greens. Fresh, air, after the cloud shed tears. Sun puts on a Van Gogh show. Color, light vibrates harmonics on oak moss and madrone bark. Trees breathing above and below the Earth to which it stands, holding the moment, indivisible from human insanity.

Where I stand or dance or walk or play. More humans join me. Wild air, ocean air, sand crash surf. Here I must admit, truthfully, and see myself as human among humans looking up, we cannot fly without wings. I cannot stand for centuries like granite boulders. I cannot grow like ancient trees that sing slow vowels to heaven and earth, in an intimate lock of breath and life and death and life. I am human full of hope and air, and error to learn from. I dance to live until I die.

EVAWAVE. dancer: Sasha Silveanu; camera work: Bart Frescura; director choreographer: Mary Power 

These “Bay Area Dance Week” offerings and the film festival journey of “Butoh Changed Everything” epitomize MpowerDance Project’s “GDP 2025: Cloud Woman Calls the Dance.”

MpowerDance Excerpt from Slow Motion Strengthening for Butoh Dance Choreography.

MpowerDance Excerpt from Slow Motion Strengthening for Butoh Dance Choreography. 

Butoh choreography, it could be argued, doesn’t exist. Butoh practice does exist. Acquiring control of our bodies in slow movement choreography, to enhance body knowledge, strength and stamina. Learn gravity and ground reaction forces before learning to release qi and spirals into high velocity movement, prevents many injuries and sustains dance ability, career. Begin at the beginning.

Dancers: Nicole Adelski, Annika Mikk, Julie Newhall, Mary Power 

Mindfulness Meditation Music by Light Music at Pixabay 

For more clips follow us on Instagram and YouTube

#butoh #butohdance #choreography #art #abstractart #contemporaryart #contemporarydance #moderndance #mindfulness #artist #meditation #playful #slowmotion #yoga #pilates #martialarts #qi #healing #womenlifefreedom #sanfrancisco #dancefilm

Spring Dance Workshop/Classes 2024 April 3 through May 29, San Francisco

Spring Dance Workshop/Classes 2024 April 3 through May 29, San Francisco

MpowerDance Project

Joe Goode Annex

Every Weds. 11-12:30pm April 3 through May 29

Registration required mpowerdance@gmail.com

drop-in $10 

Welcome to Spring Dance Workshop/Classes 2024 in San Francisco. Get ready to immerse yourself in a weekely, two month-long dance experience April 3 through May 29 at the Joe Goode Annex. 

Our workshop is heavily Butoh influenced. Our dance performance training is specific to our choreographic intent, it will be physically challenging.  Over the course, you'll experience new repetoire, directed improvisation, vocalization for dance, dance with camera, use of Visionary Dance Oracle book, and performance opportunity. Perfect classes for dancers looking to push their boundaries, get in dance shape, and grow as artists. 

Each class is filmed.

For more info, event agenda and registration go to our eventbrite page here.

Join us!!!

BADW 2024 Robot with Umbrella

 BADW 2024 Robot with Umbrella

Free Event 11-12:30pm May 1, 2024

GDP 2024: #WomenLifeFreedom

GDP 2024: #WomenLifeFreedom 

first published January 3, 2024

Our 21st century internet information age flows globally. Our globalization teeters between democracy or fascism. We have to be brave to live. 

 

Some people are now, just waking up to the joys and sorrows of the human condition happening all at once, every day. Some are finally waking up to history—familial, local, national, global—good and bad. People want to know. They even get DNA history. With all the information streaming “we are not alone in this world,” as social humans we long for community. We have to be brave to co-exist in person, real time, living in the moment, in a wild world. Change is a constant. Time keeps on. It's overwhelming if you try to control each heart beat. In our time, change impales upon us to make change in our worldview and relationships. 

Our earth is very important. The peace in nature seeks to heal our traumatic wounds. Nature wants humans to handle change, to be happy. Breathe the fresh air after a rain, walk through the forest, watch a sunset, fear can melt off, even for a moment. It’s a healthy stretch for your imagination, clearing the cobwebs. Humans are of nature. 

With the increased destruction of nature, rapidly destoying the earth itself, made by numerous wars on the planet, burning fossil fuel, strip mining, etc., we are too slow to put it together. Our earth's restorative processes adjust dramatically in response. Humans call this climate emergency, climate disaster. Earth's healing properties are getting cutoff. Our human ability for communication with ourselves, with one another, with living things, cutoff. Acts to annihilate nature purposefully, are the most cowardly and contemptuous actions made by men. There's a certain insanity involved. It's like a brain without a body that thinks itself highly intelligent, but in reality its dumber by the nanosecond as sustenance was annihilated. 

Hateful acts cease by a force of forced enlightenment. Humans will always have Karma to pay, when and where they go. If there was only one last man on this earth, in this universe, in this galaxy, who failed to comprehend his relationship with nature, with another, even if he had  not regressed entirely into the depths of evil-ignorance, still, we all would have to keep returning, lifetime after lifetime. Until finally he concluded and acted accordingly with the purpose of radiating love, the golden light for all. 

Every act of kindness, tough love, conversational agreement-disagreement-resolution-growth, holds vast significance. No matter how great or small a gesture, kindness is king, compassion is queen. As witnesses, we testify to the load of work to be done until earth’s graduation day for humans. Humans are in for lifetimes of learning, especially since we keep repeating, over and over, the same cowardly acts upon nature, the metaphor for the feminine aspect. Our earth place is an important kindergarten. It's time to get it together.

This may seem far-fetched, as if ruled by a hate-filled heart is normal. But perpetuating hate perpetuates trauma, it’s a dumb loop. There is beauty in this world. It’s the strength of a functional and loving family, not a perfect family. It’s a thoughtful and considerate neighbor, not a nosy neighbor. It’s the magnificent appreciation for the power of wonder, intelligence, and for the light of beauty without possession of it. All found within unconditional love. 

Even amid our information age, we still possess a spiritual root to life, connected to earth and cosmos. The spiritual root of life seeks unfathomable depths as anchor. The spiritual root of life gives us a loving heart, common sense, a sense of humor and more common sense. 

The next part contains sensitive content. 

Read more… 

Treacherous times require focus. That brief synopsis hardly describes any of the worst treatments of women in the 21st century. Full accounts would fill nations of libraries. Nevertheless, women’s bodies, minds and spirits will never settle for slavery to the impotent, perverted and decrepit patriarchy. Understand this. As the patriarchy expires. 

Don’t normalize tyranny over women. Don’t normalize rape culture and violence against women. There’s plenty of reasons to be courageous, heal your sons and daughters, your grandchildren, your friends. For women, for human rights of all women, we need voices lifted up. We need your voice, with song. We need our spirit lifted with the extraordinary freedom, with the freedom to dance for #WomenLifeFreedom. 

We must protect beauty.

#ZanZendegiAzadi #FemmesVieLiberte #MujerVidaLibertad #WomanLifeFreedom. #Butoh #ContemporaryDance #Choreography #SanFrancisco #GDP2024