London Butoh Workshops 2026

This series of four Butoh workshops in London all have their own particular focus and theme and can be taken alone or as a whole series. they take place on Saturday and Sunday and run from 11am to 5pm each day.

Led by Marie-Gabrielle Rotie who has studied Butoh since 1992 and has a 35 year international career as solo performer, choreographer for film, stage and experimental collaborations. She is also an academic and Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths University of London and continues to research the meeting of Butoh with extended artistic worlds. She is a long term collaborator on movement coaching and choreography with horror movie Director Robert Eggers and has created material for Alexander Skarsgaard, Anya Taylor Joy, Lily Rose Depp, Aaron Taylor Johnson, Willem Dafoe and many others.

She was fortunate to train in the early days, when nearly all the butoh founders were alive, including at Tatsumi Hijikata Asbestos Kan studios with Akiko Motofuji and in Europe and Japan with Kazuo and Yoshito Ohno, Ko Murobushi and Carlotta Ikeda. www.rotie.co.uk.

Live sound by Nick Parkin; a multi-instrumentalist musician and composer and has collaborated with Marie-Gabrielle since 1994. He plays multi-instrumental and electro-acoustic live/mixed sound in the workshop which creates an immersive, magical and ritualistic space for movement.

NOTICE!

Booking links open on April 5th and I will have a new business bank account to help with automated book keeping for HMRC 'making tax digital"! In the meantime please do email me to reserve a place!

Pricing:

Booking all four workshop weekends cost reduced to 170 x 4 = 680 (non refundable)

Booking for each workshop - 200 pounds each weekend (that is 2 days worth of teaching!)

Please do contact me directly if you are in financial difficulty and would like to attend as I can often find a solution.

Each workshop runs from 11am to 5pm each day (doors open at 10.30am)

All workshops take place in the large Studio 1, which has a full sprung dance floor and mini kitchen for drinks prep.

London School of Capoeira, Unit 1 and 2, Leeds Place, London N4 3RF (nearest tube is Finsbury Park).

Map link

Cancellation Policy: refunds are given in full if cancellation takes place 14 days prior to course start date. Cancellations within 10 days are offered 50% transfer of fee to another workshop. Cancellations of less than 10 days are non-refundable. Discounted payments are non-refundable.

Butoh: Sacrifice and Possession:

Saturday May 9th and Sunday 10th

11am to 5pm

200 pounds

‘The nikutai, transient and anarchic, is the living and raw corporeality most

exposed to deterioration and most attached to life and eroticism. Its highest

expression and potential are shown in processes like metamorphosis, modi-

fication and mutation. It continuously fluctuates between states of life and

death, presence and absence. In this study, the nikutai may be interpreted

as the nucleus of death, that which ‘disappears’ mutating into the shitai, the

corpse. Facing the nikutai necessarily implies facing death and mortality.'

(Centonze, Katja, ‘Hijikata Tatsumi’s Sabotage of Movement and The Desire to Kill the Ideology of Death, in Death and Desire in Contemporary Japan, Ca’ Foscari Japanese Studies, Italy, 2017) https://edizionicafoscari.unive.it/libri/978-88-6969-150-8/hijikata-tatsumis-sabotage-of-movement-and-the-des/

Sacrifice and possession mark the origins of Butoh through founder Tatsumi Hijikata. In this workshop we will explore the physical states and inhabitations between the living and the dead, stillness and movement. What might it mean to sacrifice the self, to dissolve, to disappear? What dance can be found in the meeting of the carnal body (Nikutai) and the performance of death states? We will explore physical inversions, dancing from fragmentation of body parts (such as the back) concealments of body parts (such as the head), limitations, and bindings of the body through material, costume and images, to find a language and method for exploring these states. We will draw upon the writings of Tatsumi Hijikata, the excellent paper by Katja Cantonze, and methods formed from Marie-Gabrielle’s 15 years of study and collaboration with Ko Murobushi as well as her own extensive choreographic and performance research.

To reserve a place email rotiemanager@me.com /bookings formally open April 5th.

Anchor 1

Anchor 2

Butoh and Somatics: Dancing from the Heart

Saturday June 27th and Sunday 28th

Live sound by Nick Parkin

Which, you ask, is the prime mover? The soul? Or the body? Body and soul are inseparable; but unless we feel that your dance steps out of your heart, it won’t attract our attention.’ (Kazuo Ohno)

‘ A Birdsong can even, for a moment, make the whole world into a sky within us, because we feel that the bird does not distinguish between its heart and the world’s’. (Rainer Maria Rilke)

Butoh invites a deep connection between our inner world, of sensations, dreams, images, memories and experiences and an ability to express this through movement. This workshop focuses on the writings and world of Kazuo Ohno, founder butoh dancer, celebrated for his ability to touch audiences worldwide with his love of dancing, and a dance that emitted love. Marie-Gabrielle studied in Japan with Kazuo Ohno in 1999 and then in Europe with Yoshito Ohno, and the workshop reflects upon her experiences of their methodologies, as well as drawing upon her own creation and training methods.

This butoh workshop also draws upon experiential anatomy, drawing and writing from the body, to explore in depth, movement issuing from the heart. The heart gives rhythm, motion, flow, impulses and carries memories, as another brain. Memories and emotion in the heart are often deeply entwined with love, grief, loss, hope, celebration and wonderment. In many ways, our heart also carries our ancestors, ghosts and memories of previous lives. We will spend time sensing, drawing, writing from the ‘messages’ sent from the heart in order to explore how to give form to our personal heart body stories.

Butoh training and exercises allow time for a deep listening, a slowing down, and a space to connect with both solo and partner work into a place where your heart stories can come to life in movement. This workshop is suitable for anyone who loves to dance or those who want to find or develop or transform their dance in a supportive environment. The workshop is suitable for any level of experience or background and is particularly useful for artists seeking to develop movement skills, or actors or dancers seeking to balance the tension between body and image. All you need is a suitable level of fitness and a passion to move. Rotie’s teaching draws upon her long engagement and study since 1993 with the lineages of both Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, and her teaching brings together strong technical and physical training, balanced with a focus on creative and imaginative playfulness.

To reserve a place email rotiemanager@me.com /bookings formally open April 5th.

Anchor 3

Dancing Butoh-Fu: the poetic body of transformation

Saturday October 24th and Sunday 25th

And ink drawing process with Yuliya V Kryolva

The space full of a field of hydrangea

an ocean of pus

a desolate cornfield

A thick grown field of dandelions

(Mikami 1986/2016)

Butoh-fu is a method generated by the founders of Butoh Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno and is a central and essential axis in Butoh training. The world of images allows us to shape and give form to an inner space-time. It is how the Butoh dancer surrenders individual identity and gives form to the space between inner world and outer worlds.

It is the tool to a constant metamorphosis and ability to enter a state of dissolution to enable poetic bodily transformation and transforming the body’s consciousness. It is also a tool for choreographic form.

In this workshop we will explore through improvisation, in mainly solo and duo tasks, the act of listening for images, navigating the place between sensation and word, becoming the image, generating images and responding to images. There is a certain skill in being able to become a ‘poet of the body’, and we look at ways to ‘write’ from the body and generate scores that allow a facility in this process, including methods derived from Surrealism. Drawing is also another method of generating images and would suit visual artists as a process. We will look at examples of Butoh-fu from the legacy of Hijikata but our interest will be mainly to find our own language of poetry to best reflect our own dance and the expression of the inner world unique to each individual.

We will then share some mini ‘solo or duo’ fragments at the end of the workshop if participants wish to do so.

This workshop is suitable for those new to Butoh as well as those with lots of experience, as the tasks lend themselves to a great degree of specificity but also creative freedom. For those wishing to develop their own dance further, this is a good opportunity to generate some material in a supportive environment.

To reserve a place email rotiemanager@me.com /bookings formally open April 5th.

december

Butoh and Costume: Dance with the Dead.

Saturday December 12th and Sunday 13th

Live sound by Nick Parkin.

Costume support from Yuliya V Krylova.

This end of year session focuses on extended and longer improvisation, to create a festival, ‘festival’ format, alternating between active witnessing and doing and leaning into creative critical feedback loops, often in pairs, to build trust and support.

In the true spirit of Samhain, we will encounter our own revenants, ghosts, demons, witches and animal spirits. Using costume and props as portals to other selves, we will dance with the departed, the undead and become our own wandering spirits on earth. In collaboration with costume designer Yuliya V Krylova. Bring your own resources as this is a joyful playground for exploration, mentoring and discovering the faces of our ancestors and that which extends before and after us.

To reserve a place email rotiemanager@me.com /bookings formally open April 5th.

London Butoh Workshops 2026

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