2025 Summer Butoh Dance Classes In-Person San Francisco

2025 Summer Butoh Dance Classes 

Wednesdays 12-1pm starts July 9 ends August 27

In-Person at 

Nob Hill Yoga 1106 Pacific Ave, San Francisco

Registration required, Click here for Eventbrite link.

Use your body-mind skills in motion art! Let's explore Butoh dance movement, group connection, improvisation, and choreography forWater Changes Rock.

Strengthen your creative body; dance with your ghost body Qi for the vagal system; ground and connect your feet with Butoh dance walks, stumbles, skips, balances; learn soft rolls to floor/to stand, utilize your mind-body skills with agility flow and speed variables; use vocals, wall work for balance, inversions and partner training.

 

  

Dance instructor Mary Power draws from techniques in Butoh, (the modern Japanese surrealist dance art form), Contemporary Modern dance, French Ballet, African dance, Pilates, Gyrotonic, Feldenkrais, Yoga, Martial Arts, Qigong and Taoist healing sounds, imagery, body leverage and agility training.

MpowerDance Project is a member of the San Francisco non-profit dance community through Independent Arts and Media. Our dance project has been making dance since 1992. Mary Power, artistic director and choreographer of MPOWERDANCE PROJECT, holds a Masters of Arts in Exercise Science and Kinesiology with an extensive background in Sports/Dancemedicine.

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 Changes Rock, Outdoor Butoh Dance Classes

 Water Changes 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