Earth Tomes
Earth Tomes
7pm Sunday, March 15, 2026
One Night Only Performance
Hairpin Arts Center, 2810 N Milwaukee Ave, 2nd floor
Co-directed by Joan/Kogut & Sharkey Zalek
Live sound by Norman W. Long
Composed music by Lee Berwick
Earth Tomes is a birth; she enters as a tree and emerges as a body turned to earth.
This iteration is o-directed by Joan Laage/ Kogut Butoh & Sharkey Zalek
Featuring twelve extraordinary butoh dancers: Cristal Sabbagh, Wannapa Pimtong-Eubanks, Aja Singletary, Helen Lee, Joan Gutiérrez, Corin Wiggins, Keiko Johnson, Elaine Lemieux, Aurora Tabar, Harlan Rosen, Sharkey Zalek, and Joan/Kogut
Tickets: https://givebutter.com/7lSQQF
Earth Tomes is a birth; she enters as a tree and emerges as a body turned to earth.
This iteration is o-directed by Joan Laage/ Kogut Butoh & Sharkey Zalek
Featuring twelve extraordinary butoh dancers: Cristal Sabbagh, Wannapa Pimtong-Eubanks, Aja Singletary, Helen Lee, Joan Gutiérrez, Corin Wiggins, Keiko Johnson, Elaine Lemieux, Aurora Tabar, Harlan Rosen, Sharkey Zalek, and Joan/Kogut
Live soundscape by Norman W. Long
Composed music by Lee Berwick
Earth Tomes exists to bring people together to celebrate dance, to celebrate our bodies, our relationships to each other, our relationship to the Earth. The desire is to ignite a passion for these relationships in the audience. Butoh, in its essential nature, is an enigmatic dance form that highlights the body clinging to life. “When one considers the body in relation to dance, it is then that one truly realizes what suffering is: it is a part of our lives. No matter how much we search for it from the outside there is no way we can find it without delving into ourselves.” exclaimed Tatsumi Hijikata in the 1970s. If anything, we have collectively grown more aware of this human condition in these days, and Butoh dancers have now had many years of experience to model this integration.
Earth Tomes was born in 1993 in the middle of the night in an outhouse at a backcountry camp on snowy Mt. Rainier, Washington, while Joan sat listening to the sounds of nature and watching the shadows cast by her flashlight. Initially a solo work, Earth Tomes became a project as Laage began inviting other dancers to join her. Since 2016, the project has been presented with local dancers in Seattle, Upstate New York, London, Liverpool, Oslo, Warsaw, Freiburg (Germany), and Pontedera (Italy) and will be presented at the University of Colorado (Boulder) just prior to Chicago. In many ways, it has become a community-based creative process and continues to evolve as it travels. It is truly a collaborative project, working with local performers and drawing them into the creative process.
About Joan Laage. After studying with Butoh masters Kazuo Ohno and Yoko Ashikawa in Tokyo in the late 80s and performing with Ashikawa’s group Gnome, Joan Laage settled in Seattle and founded Dappin’ Butoh in 1990, which she directed until 2001. She is a co-founder of DAIPANbutoh Collective, which produces an annual Butoh festival. Joan performed at the Santiago, New York, Chicago, Portland, Boulder, Seattle, and Paris Butoh festivals, and a Butoh symposium at the University of California (LA). A Ph.D. in Dance & Related Arts from Texas Woman’s University, who wrote on the significance of the body in Butoh, and Certified Movement Analyst, she is featured in Sondra Fraleigh’s books – Dancing into Darkness: Butoh, Zen, and Japan and Butoh: Metamorphic Dance and Global Alchemy. Joan is also featured in Butoh America written by Tanya Calamoneri, which will be released in August 2021, and is quoted in Vangeline’s recent publication Butoh: Cradling Empty Space. She creates site-specific work for Seattle Japanese gardens annually and tours every winter/spring in Europe where she teaches and performs and continues studying under Atsushi Takenouchi. She is an avid Tai Chi practitioner with a background in traditional Asian dance/theater and a professional gardener. Since living in Krakow from 2004–2006, she has been known as Kogut (rooster). https://seattlebutoh-laage.com/
Event Links
Tickets: https://go.evvnt.com/3454480-0
Website: https://go.evvnt.com/3454480-2
