with GIO JU
BUTOH Himalaya
Dharamshala
Butoh School 2025
9 weeks workshops ; 15 Sep-14 Nov
1 week festival ; 17 -23 Nov
BUTOH HIMALAYA
Dharamshala School Spring Course
16 March-22 May 2026
Butoh School
*** Autumn Course ; 21 Sep -29 Nov
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, receiving support from the Butoh community through a collective facilitator, butoh midwife.
We feel Dharamshala is the perfect place to explore the slow, breathing life of Butoh. Becoming a small home for Butoh explorers.
2026 spring course
The blossoming of integration and butoh production #1
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 Journey
The ten-week process is for true integration with enough time through the body. We create this space where those who thirst and hunger for the pure body and life language can delve deep together.
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.
Schedule : March 16 - May 22 2026
Mon-Fri 10am-5pm
Location : Jogiwara village, Dharamshala, India
(https://maps.app.goo.gl/ActU2VhQgHRL1ZBt5?g_st=ic )
Group member : Maximum 15 (including genre artists who will experiment with the creative process with the group)
Facilitator: Butoh midwife Gio Ju and cobody
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.
****** Integrated Work 1 - Solo & Group / Offline & Online
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.
Integrated Work 2 - Solo & Group / Offline & Online with various landscapes
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.
Integrated Work 3 - Solo & Group / Offline & Online with various art genres
Chapter 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.
Epilogue(Week 11) : Those who remain for the eleventh week after the festival will share feedback and create various mediums between butoh time and everyday life.
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.
subbody(solo)_Cobody(group) Creation process & festival
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.
Photos by
Marina Whang
Chris Oliveira
And cobody
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>
1 month : 410 euros
1 week : 120 euros
For India and neighboring country participant 40% discount
1 month : 22,000 INR
1 week : 6,400 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
<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 20,000 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