Dear Butoh afficionados,

Kemelo Anozipho Sehlapelo and bodyhacker (aka Sall Lam Toro) have conjured the black butoh network. We invite you into the first black butoh network gathering to train with the Japanese butoh dancer duo Mutsumineiro in Copenhagen on the 9th March 2026 from 15:00-19:00 at Dansatelier. This training session is separatist for black folk only.

The black butoh network is a newly established and collectively organized space for sharing affinity, love and practice of the study of Japan’s avant-garde butoh dance within an Afro/black diasporic lens and approaches. Our wish for the black butoh network is to create opportunities for Afro/black*diasporic peoples encounter each other through the movement practice and philosophy of butoh. To discover the history of the “blackening of butoh”, and to situate ourselves in the multiple temporalities of this blackening.

Takashi (2015) records butoh co-founder, Tatsumi Hijikata’s words on butoh as a “convulsion of existence” that opposes expression in the traditional sense, but rather provides a form that “expresses without expressing” (p.007). That is, a dance form that does not emerge from projection or acting, rather the contrary, a dance form that flees in time, “yet survives because it disappears” (Takashi, M. 2015)! The author, relying on and analysing Hijikata’s recorded accounts on butoh considers it a form of that begun as “anti-dance” and developed into a form of “rebellion of the body” (p.019). The author, Namiko Kunimoto, called butoh a “revolt of the flesh” through twisting (in the literal sense), bending, shaking, and maintaining the bizarre and strange in the body.

Our curiosity lies in tracing afro/black diasporic cosmologies of ritual, aspects of trance movement and lineages within butoh’s early origins. The idea is to organize a "counter-scholarship" of collective research and practice. We strive to give black bodies, movers, dancers, whether they are already butoh practitioners, teachers, students, or have been curious about butoh, the access to workshops and shared practice spaces.

The 9th March is significant as a date since it is the birthday of Tatsumi Hijikata, co-founder of early ankoku butoh (dance of darkness). Early butoh critics recognized a racialized blackness in butoh from West African and Caribean vodoo-ist cosmologies, incorporation practices and rituals. In fact, the early Hijikata’s ankoku butoh was heavily inspired by the work of the great African-American modern dancer Katherine Durham’s show tour in Japan in the 1957. The show emulated aspects from Santeria in music, and sacrificial ceremonies from Haitian voodoo/voudun during her fieldwork in Cuba, Haiti and other parts of the Caribean. We won’t be getting so much into all this YET in our meeting, but I wanted you to have this in mind.

On the 9th March, we will meet and expose ourselves to the universe of butoh from the perspective of our teachers who learned from the great Yoshito Ono, son of butoh co-founder Kazuo Ono. Their butoh philosophy is:

GIVE EVERYTHING YOU HAVE.

Dance will be born and vanished in one moment. It never continues and then, it comes back.

Dance opens unrevealed possibilities.

Only when you are trying to give everything, dance has a chance to be purified and transformation can appear.

The real deal of BUTOH is to meet the unrevealed world by revealing oneself.

Being awed, shivering will turn to be a great feeling.

Take off your guard, fully open and throw yourself into the most thrilled but nothing of special moment.

Endlessly keep on throwing yourself into it.

It is about entering it, and when you are entering, you are leaving.

Just like a flower blooming, even while it is dying.

Never stop blooming.

Our workshop shares some points for founding the bases of existence through your body.

For example:

- Diagonal line and Horizontal line

Dancer is dance

Ground is death/ Living on the death/ Living against falling/

Body as vessel

(Spears through you)

- Breathing

(Strings)

Freeze time

Transparent sensations/ Precision/ Eyes

- Gravity

(Life = Resistance)

- Space

(Between you and the others, there is no inside/outside)

Taste until your bones feel /Dance with the universe/

The universe will dance on your palm/Become the smallest point in the universe/

Hiding is where beauty breathes //Resolution of your presence/

Give a shape to the micro vibration of your life

We depart from the question: Where are you standing at? - We often forget or don’t even think about it.

About the teachers:

Mutsumineiro are a Japanese butoh dance and performance artist duo, married together as life and artistic partners, and also educators in their field. They are based just outside Oslo, Norway performing and facilitating different workshops and butoh education all over the world. Together they dance a longing for idiotic blessing moments, an eternal marriage in which Marc Chagall's flowers bloom, or even miraculous fruits of their life and their universe.

https://www.mutsumineiro.com

Practicalities:

• Payment: sliding scale 350-900 DKK via mobile pay (71675213) or cash

• Wear comfortable clothes

• Wear thick socks or move barefooted

• The training session will last 5 hours

• bring water and light snacks

Session will go on the 9.3.2026 from 15:00-19:00

Address of the studio:

Dansatelier

Blegdamsvej 18A

2200 Nørrebro, Copenhagen

Contact Sall or Neiro with concerns or questions:

salllamtoro@bodyhacker.love

neironeironeiro@hotmail.co.jp

References:

Kunimoto, Namiko (2021) “Tsujimura Kazuko And The Body Object”. Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus,retrieved from https://apjjf.org/2021/3/kunimoto

Morishita, T. (2015) “Hijikata Tatsumi's Notational Butoh: An innovative method for butoh creation”. Tokyo, Keio University Art Center

Arimitsu, Michio (2015) “From Voodoo to Butoh: Katherine Dunham, Hijikata Tatsumi, and Trajal Harrell’s Transcultural Refashioning of “Blackness”. Published by MOMA

We begin the spring season with artist Body_hacker (aka Sall Lam Toro), who will be in residence at Black Archives Sweden (BAS) from 2–8 February.
Black Archives Sweden’s residency program is an opening gesture toward imagining the archive as a living laboratory—experimental, alive, and shaped by the people who move through it. At the center of this work is our growing reference library, envisioned not as a fixed collection but as a living ecosystem. Residents are invited to contribute practices, materials, and methods that expand what the archive can become. Grounded in Black critical thought, the residency prioritizes dialogue, research, process, rest, and collective imagination over the production of finished works.

During their time at BAS, Body_hacker will dive into a non-existent archive of untold, fictive, and real stories of plant companionship and magic, guided by the question: How could such an archive arise? This inquiry unfolds through encounters that reveal or conceal—through writing, gestures of deep listening, and moments that spark subtle undercurrents. Body_hacker explores the relational potential between humans and plants, uncovering histories of collaboration and care (and more-than-human kinships), while asking what other(ed) contexts might emerge from these entanglements and forms of cosmological intimacy.
Join us on Saturday, 7 February, 2–4 pm, for an artist presentation in which Body_hacker shares their practice, research, and minor unravelings encountered during the residency.

written by BAS team

for updates check https://www.blackarchivessweden.com/events/

Are you interested in exploring care practices within your art practice, projects, or collaborations? Join me for an online introductory session on artistic caretaking.

In this session, we will:

• Explore care work in artistic practices and collaborative processes
  

• Learn how to craft care riders as tools for sustainable and supportive artistic work
  

• Engage in a short somatic exercise to activate an embodied sense of care and deepen somatic listening
  

• Reflect together on what artistic caretaking might look like for your own practice, project, or collaboration

At the end of the session, a survey link will be shared for those interested in taking part in 1:1 artistic caretaking sessions later this year.

📅 Date & Time: 8th October 2025 from 13:00-14:00
💻 Location: Online (link will be shared upon registration)
🎟️ Registration: email info.limcollective@gmail.com to secure a spot.

Open to professional artists, their collaborators, practitioners within fields of art, activism, community work interested in working with care within creative practices.

The Mutual Moves is a series of workshops organised by lim collective, aimed at addressing the working conditions of art work through practices sharing, development and planning of support and infrastructures. The programme is supported by Den Jyske Kunstfond and BKF. lím collective is an artist-run exhibition platform based in Aalborg with activities throughout North Jutland. The artistic programme supports visual artists working with socially engaging, critical and research-based practices on health, inequality and care activism through interdisciplinary collaborations with local communities.

“(W)ailing curses” is a performance intervention that unfolds a collective somatic-making of curses. The curse is taken by a political conjuring, that is, a reclaiming of our collective agency and power to curse what oppresses us, denies our humanity and life, restricts our freedom or deadens us. You are invited to curse with your flesh, your senses, and your erotic self. You are invited to curse with your flesh, your senses, and your erotic self. The performance is part of the program Queer Gaze curated by Felicia Mulinari and taking place at Ocenanen in Gothenburg on the 11th September at 21:00.

Water stirs our grief:a choir of tears (2025-)

A final work in progress sharing of a site specific sound installation with a live performance happening unfolds at the Community Kulturcentrum in Malmö on the 22nd May 2025 from 15:00 to 18:30. In collaboration with Alex and Jonas Snarl from the centre, Amalia Garay, Auria Paz and Skrot we stage the first chapter of Sall Lam Toro aka body_hacker’s thesis - “WATER STIRS OUR GRIEF: A CHOIR OF TEARS”. We invite you into an ecoerotic sonic meditation where an array of voices speak and scheme a garden into existence based on three acts:   

Act I - represents water as a primordial element of a (meta)physical garden of revolt; this act introduces embodied and unembodied characters that exchage poems amongst each other but also speak them from a same body. These fragments will be useful for further journeys we will take together.  

Act II – represents a water journey on the train between Copenhagen - Malmö where voices reflect on the oceanic water that lays under the öresund bridge as a sensuous body that evokes grieving modes due to border violence. 

Act III -  represents a water journey into the strait of Gibraltar in the atlantic ocean where orcas plot different throwings of boats ignited by the presence of millions of ghosts previously having lost their lives during the atlantic slave trade, and within modern migrating routes crossing the African and European continents.

The sound weaves elements from specific locations, memories, nature elements, voices and an aspect of non-linear time where past, present and future blend and crossover. These sounds reflect erotic relationships between the inner livings of human and non-human bodies allowing the spectator to become a witness and an active participant of this universe.

The performance aspect activates each of the areas of the sound installation with ritualistic acts, semi-improvised movement based on practices of body_hacking  - a movement practice and a modus operandi / a mode of embodiment of ecoeroticism that resists all the ways our bodies, our capacity to feel, sense and connect has been colonized and continuously hijacked under capitalism. Body_hacking attempts to connect the seen and the unseen, matter and ghosts, the sensuous, the metaphysical and the poetic into bodies.

SCHEDULE

22nd May 2025 at CKC, Lodgatan 3B, Malmö, Sweden

15:00-15:25 – Arrival and welcoming  - our host, Jonas will be introducing the space

15:30 - 16:00 - Performance 1

16:00-16:30 – Installation cycle 1 (wandering around the sound space areas)

16:30 - 16:50 - Installation cycle 2 (wandering around the sound space areas)

16:50 - 17:10 - Performance 2

17:10 - 17:20 - Reprise of cycle 2 (wandering around the sound space areas)

17:20 - 17:50 - Installation Cycle 3 (wandering around the sound space areas)

17:50 - 18:30 - Performance 3

AUDIENCE GUIDELINES

You are invited to interact with the installation,  get your feet wet, vocalize and move with us. You may stay as long as you like between 15:00 and 18:30. One of the areas contains loud sound, we recommend bringing earplugs.

DO NOT TOUCH THE PLANTS!!!!!

CREDITS

creator, writer, performer, direction and costume styling: Sall Lam Toro

co-development, performer, sound composition and engineering: Amalia Lukacks

sound composition: Auria Paz

scenography: Alex (CKC)

sound work support and scenography support: SKROT

choreographic consultant and support: Duo Mutsumineiro

text feedback: Felicia Mulinari

conversation partners and interviews with: Auria Paz, Yancé-Myah Harrison, Bella Normark and RABELADES

hosting and coordination support: Community kulturcentrum

partners: Hosting Lands and Community kulturcentrum