Vangeline

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Vangeline is a teacher, dancer, and choreographer specializing in the Japanese postwar avant-garde movement form Butoh. She is the Artistic Director of the Vangeline Theater (New York), a dance company firmly rooted in the tradition of Japanese Butoh while carrying it into the 21st century. Vangeline's work has been heralded in such publications as the New York Times (“captivating”), Los Angeles Times (“moves with the clockwork deliberation of a practised Japanese Butoh artist”), and LA Weekly. Time OUT Chicago named Vangeline's "one of the best Dance visits of 2011." More recently her four-star performance of BUTOH BEETHOVEN received critical acclaim at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2015 and was dubbed ‘Exquisite…a resplendent piece of performance theatre; a true tour de force, literally a feat of strength, within and without.” Vangeline is the winner of the 2015 Gibney Dance's Beth Silverman-Yam Social Action Award. She is the founder of the New York Butoh Institute and her work was recently featured on CNN's Great Big Story.

Whether we explore the Self through words, images, music or movement, we symbolically offer to others a vision and a statement about that which we are. We help define and shape collective ideals by undertaking this journey into ourselves.

This undertaking requires rigorous honesty, and a desire to explore without relying on the opinion of others.

Butoh can lead us back to our rebellions, our private wars, our wounded selves, and through the process brings what is hidden into the light. The process is deeply healing and transformative.

Shedding various masks and layers of conditioning leads to more honesty. When we are stripped of our defenses, we can offer our best. We become more capable of intimacy. We can be fully creative.

To quote Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim. ”the more mechanized and fragmented the world around us, the more we must develop the humanity of human relations. The more we live in a mass society, the better we must know how to have intimate relations.”

Butoh can take us on a path to embracing ourselves fully, transforming our Shadow, finding beauty and strength from the depth of our fragility.

It can be an instrument of personal and collective transformation in the 21st century.
This transformation comes from holding a mirror to each other and integrating our many facets- the beautiful and the ugly; and from reintegrating the forgotten of our society into our midst.
The Dance:
Trance of becoming.

The fact of the dance verifies the soul’s lust for otherness.
As we wander through the visions of our many facets we but demonstrate our thirst for what lies beyond.

The Answer:

the wind blew across the water.
The world woke up.