Initiated by GIO JU
Dharamshala Butoh School
BUTOH HIMALAYA
2025 Autumn Course
15 Sep-23 Nov : Completed
2026 Spring Course
16 March-22 May
Spring course is fully booked. We close registration. Thanks!
2026 Autumn Course
14 Sep-20 Nov (Rescheduled)
Registration is in progress.
2027 Spring Course
1 Mar- 7 May
Registration is in progress.
Registration : dustgiobody@gmail.com
<2026-2027 10-week courses>
<A brief course introduction>
Butoh allows us to explore various layers of existence and transformation. Particularly during a long-term course, we delve into the mystery of expanding into unpredictable depths and dimensions. Dharamshala, India, is an ideal location for an extended Butoh experience. This unique place blends chaos and tranquility, as the shelter for pilgrims of life and death with the mysterious energy of the Himalayas. Participants will engage with local natural spaces, ruins, and distinctive environments.
<Dharamshala Butoh School classes>
2026-2027 10-week Course Flow
Mon-Fri, 10am-5pm class and Every Friday performance with public
The last week of the course is with international Butoh festival.
It is a process of shedding socialized thinking, listening to the pure body language, experimenting, digesting, fermenting, and discovering dance that defies expectations. It is a fierce process of rebellion against our molded intellects and habituated bodies. It is a process of deep love that shifts from the control of the mind to the resonance of skin and cells, embracing the vulnerability of our lives and dissolving boundaries between self and others.
It is a kind of sacrifice that desperately discovers the world within oneself in the unfamiliar darkness and illuminates the hidden world within the audience. It is a collective womb experience that blurs the boundaries between self and others, between performer and audience. It is the art of being to communicate our existence as it is, between shame and pain, longing and love, life and death.
Exploring Butoh, a discipline that resonates with pure body language rather than merely understanding it intellectually, is a long-term endeavor. Slow breathing is necessary to traverse relaxation and experimentation, chaos and liberation, multidimensionally. A group that can vibrate across diverse boundaries and a multi-genre artistic sensibility encompassing movement, sound, writing, and drawing will be great supports for expanding and integrating Butoh exploration.
The blossoming of integration and butoh production
This spring semester marks the first of the intensive courses in Butoh Himalaya. Unlike the usual classes, we accept students on a monthly basis with a limited number in the group. Weekly participants will only be accepted during the first and second weeks of the full course.
10-week Flow
The 10-week course is structured as follows:
As this is an intensive creative course, we recommend participation for at least four weeks. You can choose your starting week. Short-term participation (one to two weeks) is only available for the first two weeks of the 10-week course. Each week, participants will be encouraged to experiment with a variety of artistic mediums and genres through creative consultation.
*** However, cameras are not permitted during class, and the only cameras allowed during performances are those permitted by prior arrangement.
Chapter 1> Week 1-2: Opening multi-layers
Body training that breaks habits. And existential relaxation with a multidimensional Butoh approach. Medi-motion, Resonance touch and experiencing Subbody Butoh conditionings as collective womb experiences. Encountering hidden bodies and hidden worlds, discovering one's own unique butoh as a dance of blood.
Chapter 2> Week 3-6: Expansion
During the course of Chapter 1, participants will explore own necessary paths and develop diverse directions. Through the exploration of the infinite group(Cobody) resonance patterns, we will discover new selves, invisible us through dance. In this way, we will transcend the boundaries between self and others, dancing the space in between(Ma), crystallizing potential bodies.
Group exploring will culminate in solo creation, deepening the collaborative research process of peeling back multidimensional layers, alone or together freely.
In addition to utilizing the school's indoor studio, garden, and outdoor spaces, we will also embark on exploratory trips to nature, ruins, and interesting local communities. These include riverside, mud, hot springs, and Himalayan nature exploration.
We explore Butoh scores by Hijikata who is one of butoh founder, which are Quiet house, Sick dancing princess, Bugs walk, Size walk, Ash walk. And we create our own score.
Chapter 3> Week 7-8: Integration and Production
The pure body language discovered over the past six weeks is integrated with various art genres and created into works. Individual and group production processes are created according to individual needs, including butoh scores and dances, images and sounds, costumes and space as hidden skin, and experimentation with boundaries between online and offline audiences. To experiment what is butoh communication with world, how life language resonates with all the communication tools including camera. But always we are free not to involve camera as well.
IChapter 4> Week 9-10: Shared dance experience with Himalaya Butoh Festival
This is the time for preparations for the experimental festival and sharing with the audience with local and international. The experiments to be presented will be determined over the past eight weeks.
Gallery of 2025 Autumn Class
Photos by
Marina Whang
Chris Oliveira
And cobody
Everyday Flow of 10-week
Everyday various conditionings
- Shift to subbody Butoh Mode
Various internal and external conditions through eight channels:body, movement, sound, image, relationship, emotion, world, and awareness. It creates safe personal space where we can fully face to self, and group work(cobody) where we can explore relationships between various boundaries and ultimately expanding self into multi dimension.
Strengthening and Relaxation
Through our Butoh journey, we ultimately experience the freedom of infinite transformation. To embark on this path, discipline and patience must accompany us. Each morning, we train to attune ourselves to both the visible and invisible aspects of our bodies through dantien training, gravity, relaxation, and the flow of energy.
Journey of collective womb and self research
We will be guided to mysterious places. This place may be a time and space close to the present, or it could be an abyss that exists beyond memory. In that space, I am both myself and not myself. Sometimes we are alone, and sometimes we are with others as we cross various boundaries and open the secret door together.
Integration
Subbody Cobody Free Resonance
It will be guided by various free resonance fields that crosses multiple boundaries between the focus on self and the relationship with others. Like a wind that is unconfined, you will face an infinite transformation dance of the body that is not limited to the social frame.
Final integrated creation with festival
Photos by
Marina Whang
Chris Oliveira
And cobody
We invite audiences to perform every Friday for a week-long integration. The festival continues with a ten-week integration. Through group exploration of diverse patterns, we develop solo work and experiment with the boundaries between individual and group, performer and audience.
Midwife
GIO JU
The midwife of this entire process is Gio Ju. Gio is the longest-serving student, collaborator and a midwife of the previous subbody Butoh School. In addition to subbody butoh, deeply influenced by other Butoh masters, she has developed her Butoh approach by traversing the contemporary and primal aspects of Indian, Korean, and Japanese cultures. This ten-week program crystallizes 15 years of personal exploration with students. Simultaneously, Gio will share her artistic experience—writing, film, documentary, clothing production, and collaborative experimentation with various art forms—with Butoh, creating a space for the production of new and unexplored Butoh content.
<Class fee> from 2026 Autumn course
1 month (4weeks) : 470 euros
1 week : 140 euros
For India and neighboring country participant 40% discount
1 month (4weeks) : 24,000 INR
1 week : 7,000 INR
If you register for a two- or three-month course, a separate discount for long-term course registration will be applied, and flexible prices may be applied for partial exchanges. Transport and accommodation is not included. Please email us if you have any special issues or suggestions and any questions.
GIO JU : dustgiobody@gmail.com
Subbody Butoh School
History of dharamshala butoh school
Dharamshala, meaning "shelter for travelers and pilgrims," is a special place where multi national spiritual, artistic, and life travelers and pilgrims stay and create their own lives. The Dharamshala Butoh School was founded here in 2005 by Butoh master Rhizome Lee. He moved from Japan to Dharamshala, initiating Subbody Butoh Method and he ran the school until 2019. In 2024, the school was reborn as Butoh Himalaya by Gio Ju, a collaborative research school for Butoh explorers.
She has been involved with the school since 2010 and began guiding classes in Europe and at the school with Rhizome Lee since 2016. As the school's longest-trained and collaborative researcher, Gio Ju as the next generation is running the school after Rhizome Lee, following co-research method and facilitating various butoh and body exploration approaches from various teachers and methods.
Unlike other Butoh methods, this school emphasizes collaborative exploration across multiple dimensions, both individual and group.(Subbody-Cobody) By exploring these infinite patterns of collaborative exploration, the school helps participants discover their own unique dance, art, and Butoh through unexplored experiences between self and others, and self and the world. Thus, since its founding, collaborative research among participants has been a key asset, with the development of a unique resonance butoh method. Furthermore, the school's facilities, combined with the mystical surroundings of the Himalayas, provide a truly unique space, a collective womb for Butoh explorers. Within this framework, Butoh Himalaya, which relaunched in 2025, serves as a collective womb, a home of dance explorers and a community space for collaborative research for Butoh dance explorers from around the world. It is a ten-week course of exploration and culminates in a festival-based creative process, held twice a year, in spring and Autumn. Butoh Himalaya's long-term vision is to expand and relocate the school of Butoh explorers across diverse spaces and environments on the earth by resonating with visible and invisible entities, nature, and life stories from around the world, and discovering dance and art within them. Butoh Himalaya will exist as a Butoh school that transcends boundaries such as physical condition, age, and nationality, expanding and rediscovering the essence of Butoh.
Gallery of school history
<Accommodation and Transport>
International airport is Delhi International Airport, and in India, you can fly to Kangra(Dharamshala) airport, or BUS or Train is also good options.
You can find simple accommodations with a kitchen for around 12,000 to 25,000 Indian rupees per month, and the cost of fresh vegetables and fruits is low, allowing for a simple lifestyle.
When you decide to come to Dharamshala, email me.
I can support more practical information depends on your location and situation.
Looking forward to dancing together.
Thanks!
Gio Ju