ONE NIGHT ONLY Piercing Heart
ONE NIGHT ONLY
Piercing Heart
February 23, 7:30pm
2025
Solo performance created by Joan Laage/Kogut Butoh
Commissioned music by Bill Horist
@Asian Improv aRts Midwest, 4875 N Elston Ave, Chicago, IL 60630
So many thoughts and desires pierce our consciousness, our hearts, sometimes settling, other times escaping through the fleeting air. Where do we find our freedom and peace? In confinement or total abandonment? Piercing Heart was performed twice with live music by Bill Horist at Shimmer: Seattle Summer Butoh Festival and at the Chapel venue in Seattle in 2023 and at an experimental music festival in Vienna with musicians Florian Feit and Christoph Punzmann the same year.
______
Bio: Residing in Seattle WA for many years, Joan/Kogut is known as the Northwest butoh pioneer.
She is one of the few non-Japanese to study with and dance under Yoko Ashikawa in her
Tokyo-based group Gnome in the late 80’s. She also studied with Kazuo and Yoshito Ohno.
Joan has performed and taught at many festivals including the first New York butoh festival,
Seattle and Salish Sea Butoh Festivals, Vienna’s Hybrid Butoh Festival, Butoh Festival (Tenri)
and En Chair et En Son Acousmatic Festival in Paris, and at the Amsterdam and Warsaw Butoh
Festival in 2024. Brought by Vangeline Theater, Joan presented her solo Rivers Running Red in New
York City. Her work has been presented in Chicago by Nicole Legette. She wrote a dissertation
on the butoh body and is featured in Tanya Calamoneri’s Butoh America. Joan directs an annual
site-specific event in the Seattle’s Japanese gardens. Since living in Krakow 2004–2006, she
has been known as Kogut (rooster). www.seattlebutoh-laage.com
Event Links
Tickets: https://go.evvnt.com/2864097-0
Website: https://go.evvnt.com/2864097-2
