“Emotions were clearly running high as Joan Laage, who also goes by the name of Kogut Butoh, another polished butoh dancing veteran of multiple decades, opened Saturday night’s show with a brilliant solo performance, elegantly woven into the fabric of this evening’s loss, yet still transcending its sadness to deliver a whimsical tribute to the woman’s body and menstrual cycle in Rivers Running Red.”
-Erez Kats, Quixotic Entertainment (Seattle Butoh Festival 2021)

“Her (Joan Laage) style is so rooted, elementary, and organic that it seemed like the flow of the earth itself..."
- Sharon Cumberland, Seattle Gay News (Earth Tomes)

"She's a scarily charismatic performer with exquisite control over every facial tic and limb-twist she brings to a character."
-Michael Upchurch,The Seattle Times (Black Widow)

“Laage was alternately magisterial, creepy, and lyrical—and her power over the audience was undeniable.”
-John McFarland, P-form Magazine (Imprints)

JOAN LAAGE

After studying with Kazuo Ohno and Yoko Ashikawa in Tokyo in the late 80s and performing with Ashikawa’s group Gnome, Joan Laage settled in Seattle and directed Dappin’ Butoh from 1990-2001. She is a co-founder of DAIPANbutoh Collective, which produces an annual butoh festival. Joan has performed at many festivals including the first New York butoh festival, and most recently, at Vienna’s Hybrid Butoh Festival and Paris’ En Chair et en Son Acousmatic Festival. A Ph.D. from Texas Woman’s University, who wrote on the butoh body and Certified Movement Analyst (NYC), she is featured in Sondra Fraleigh’s books and in Tanya Calamoneri’s Butoh America. She creates site-specific work for Seattle Japanese gardens annually and tours every winter in Europe. She is an avid Tai Chi practitioner with a background in traditional Asian dance/theater and a professional gardener. Since living in Krakow 2004–2006, she has been known as Kogut (rooster).

Photos by r. nihiline

VANGELINE

Vangeline is a teacher, dancer, and choreographer specializing in Japanese butoh. She is the artistic director of the Vangeline Theater/New York Butoh Institute (New York), a dance company firmly rooted in the tradition of Japanese butoh while carrying it into the twenty-first century. With her all-female dance company, Vangeline’s socially conscious performances tie together butoh and activism. Vangeline is the founder of the New York Butoh Institute Festival, which elevates the visibility of women in butoh, and the Queer Butoh festival. She pioneered the award-winning, 15-year running program The Dream a Dream Project, which brings butoh dance to incarcerated men and women at correctional facilities across New York State.

She is the winner of a 20222/23 Gibney Dance DIP artist Residency; a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Dance Award; is a 2018 NYFA/NYSCA Artist Fellow in Choreography for Elsewhere, and the winner of the 2015 Gibney Dance Social Action Award, as well as the 2019 Janet Arnold Award from the Society of Antiquaries of London.

She pioneered the first neuroscientific study of Butoh “The Slowest Wave;” Her work is the subject of CNN’s “Great Big Story” "Learning to Dance with your Demons.” She is also featured on BBC’s podcast Deeply Human with host Dessa (episode 2 of 12: Why We Dance).
www.vangeline.com