A heartfelt tribute to the great Butoh teacher who died in November 2020 and who last performed on stage and held one of his workshops at Danae Festival in 2019, exactly a year before his death. An eclectic figure, he was also an actor and explored many arts including writing, cinema and, of course, dance.

Three days of workshops, video projections, sharing of thoughts and performances by Italian and international artists who studied and/or worked with him, who were close to him, many of whom have been part of Danae Festival’s artistic community over the years: the choreographer, writer and yoga teacher Francesca Proia, who in her career worked with Romeo Castellucci, Monica Francia, Masaki Iwana, Ermanna Montanari, Silvia Rampelli; the dancer, performer and educator Cristina Negro, who studied with Carolyn Carlson, Teri Weikel, Dominique Dupuy, Masaki Iwana; the choreographer Silvia Rampelli, director of the independent performing research project Habillé d’eau, whose work Euphoria was awarded the 2018 Premio Ubu for best dance play; the dancer and choreographer Alessandra Cristiani, who has been studying theory and practice of Ankoku Buto for over twenty years, and whose choreographic works involve a dialogue with other disciplines; the dancer/performer and musician Moeno Wakamatsu, who studied at the Merce Cunningham School and the Feldenkrais method in New York, wife of Masaki Iwana and keeper of his artistic legacy; the two great sound experimenters Michel Doneda, whose sonic and life practices rely so much on improvisation as to make him one of its most original interpreters on a world scale – he worked with Elvin Jones, John Zorn, Fred Frith, Eliot Sharp, Daunik Lazro, Martine Alterburger, Barre Phillips, Tetsu Saitoh, Kazue Sawai, Fred Van Hove, Phil Wachsmann –, and Lê Quan Ninh, a percussionist with a classical education from the Versailles Conservatory and an enthusiast of free improvisation – he collaborated in dance and improvisation with Fine Kwiatkowski, Michel Raji, Masaki Iwana, Moeno Wakamatzu, Patricya Kuypers, among others. The project benefits from the valuable devising work by Cristina Negro, who prompted us to give shape to a desire of hers that was also ours.

8pm
This is my beginning
a video interview to Masaki Iwana
duration: 13 minuti  

8.15pm
Silvia Rampelli 
Back to the source
duration: 15 minuti

8.30pm
Moeno Wakamatsu and Lê Quan Ninh (France/Japan) 
A tree on the other side  
performance 
duration: 45 minutes

“Where the ground turns into roots, the branches turn into sky, the edge of the sky falls over, on the other side… being is non-being.
I wish to suspend the moment when the invisible and the visible, the shapeless and the shape, the life and the non-life melt together – timelessly and promptly… like a dream suspended in reality, in the fabric of conscience”.
(Moeno Wakamatsu)

A talk with the audience will follow