PORT TOWNSEND — The weeklong Salish Sea Butoh Festival is taking place at Fort Worden.
“Butoh is like a contemporary dance theater,” said festival founder and executive producer Iván-Daniel Espinosa.
The avant-garde form was founded in the 1950s and 1960s in Tokyo.
It has been anti-establishment, counter-culture and iconoclastic since its establishment, Espinosa said, and it seeks to contest and challenge mainstream normative culture.
“At its heart and at its core, Butoh is about connecting with those larger forces that shape our lives like nature and natural storms, hurricanes, primordial things that have been with humans since the beginning, birth and death,” Espinosa said.
Butoh can appear strange, gruesome and surreal. Dancers’ entire bodies are painted white, and instead of favoring upright postures and soaring leaps and turns, valued in other forms, dancers are characteristically low to the ground.
“Butoh is in an earthy, subterranean dance, close to the ground, close to mud, close to the soil,” Espinosa said. “The founder (Tatsumi Hijikata) once said, ‘Butoh is a dance that crawls towards the bowels of the earth.’”
Now in its fifth year, the festival of dance workshops with masters from Japan, Mexico, Australia and the United States will culminate in public opportunities to witness the singular art form.
Tonight from 8:30 p.m. to 10 p.m. at Fort Worden’s Building 204, Dr. Rosemary Candelario will give a lecture called “BUTOH ECOLOGIES: Dancing with Nature as Embodied Ecological Praxis,” followed by a Q&A.
In the 1980s, a brand or current of Butoh concerned with ecological questions and questions of interconnectivity with nature emerged, Espinosa said.
Friday and Saturday nights, performances will be at Fort Worden’s USO Hall. Doors will open at 7:30 p.m. and performances will start at 8 p.m.
Friday night’s four performances will highlight dancers and choreographers from the United States and Mexico.
Saturday night’s performances will highlight artists from Japan, as well as dance choreographed by Espinosa.
Tickets for both events can be purchased for $25 at https://givebutter.com/salishseabutoh2025.
On Sunday, a free event with a performance from an Indonesian dance group will take place in the forest on a private Chimacum property. Those interested in attending should email salishseabutohfestival@gmail.com for an address.
Western audiences often say they experience performances as having a zen quality, Espinosa said.
“Embodying stillness is an important theme in Japanese aesthetics and in Butoh,” he said. “Embodying stillness, minimalism, a sense of serenity and equanimity, even amidst chaos and theatricality.”
Audiences may have emotional responses to performances, but generally, it would be a mistake to associate performers’ intense facial expressions with expressions of emotion.
“The face is treated as the whole body is treated, as material,” Espinosa said. “It’s material to be sculpted and shaped. Sometimes when we’re doing training for the performances, the teachers say, ‘Your face is mud, and now take your hands and fingers and spread them all over your face, twisted around and push into the mud and make shapes in the mud. Now take your hands off of your face, keep making all those shapes with the muddy surface that is your face.’ Or, ‘Your face is clay.’ Or, ‘Your face is a tree that’s decaying and decomposing. ’”
Choreographers often will provide poetic visual prompts to dancers, Espinosa said. The narratives generally are more like surreal poetry than linear plot-driven narratives, he said.
“Like when you have a powerful dream,” he continued. “It’s powerful, it’s vivacious, the colors are bright, sights, smells, sounds. It’s very embodied. You feel like you’re there, but it’s a dream, so the details are very fuzzy.”
The dance form, though non-religious, has a ceremonial quality, Espinosa said. Performances invite attendees to meditate deeply on their relationship to nature and to a planet in crisis, he said.
“Butoh came out of post-World War II, after the bomb,” Espinosa said. “A very destabilized time in Japan with the American occupation and Gen. Douglas MacArthur and this influx of Western influences suddenly coming into a country that used to be an isolationist country, Imperial Japan. Then technology is changing. The TV was invented in ‘45. Rapid industrialization, rapid modernization.”
Espinosa said that, even then, there was a theme of resistance to developing too close a relationship with technology and losing connection with nature.
Espinosa said he started the festival in response to observing a reduced presence in Butoh festivals in the United States. In the 1990s and 2000s, the festivals were popular and many, he said, from San Francisco, to Portland, Ore., to New York City.
“They don’t exist anymore,” he said. “They’re no longer produced.”
With very few Butoh festivals left in America and the ones that are left lacking serious funding, Espinosa sought to bring a well-funded festival to Port Townsend that could bring in a full roster of reputed artists from the older generation of Butoh masters, he said.
Espinosa chose Port Townsend because he wanted to bring the festival setting out of the urban surroundings in which many previous festivals had been produced.
“I wanted to create a Butoh festival that took place in nature that was more of a nature retreat, so that people can dance amongst the trees and the water and the ocean,” Espinosa said. “Our student performances take place at Fort Worden, on the beach, in the bunkers. The Peninsula is so rich with evocative natural landscapes, forests and biodiversity. All of that inspires the butoh artists and the students that are taking the workshops.”
To learn more about the festival, its faculty and performers, visit https://www.salishseabutoh.com.
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Reporter Elijah Sussman can be reached by email at elijah.sussman@peninsuladailynews.com.
