Dive into a surreal nightclub experience where cabaret collides with chaos! ButohBAR 番狂わせ OUT of ORDER II features an enthralling dance, cabaret, song and visual art. The evening is centred around the art form Butoh, a hypnotic style of Japanese dance theatre.

5 - 9 March 2025
Abbotsford Convent
Australia

Special one-night only performance
Hana - Flower - 花
By Atsushi Takenouchi & Hiroko Komiya

Tue 25 February 2025
St Mary Anglican Church
Australia

Moving and shaking, creating funny shapes with your body and face, children jump headfirst into a world of transformation and shape-shifting. The artists cheerfully guide children to create and summon their imaginative kooks and spooks. 

Reviving the 70’s/80’s era where Butoh thrived in nightclubs and strip joints, ButohBAR - OUT of ORDER summons the raw spirit of those times, embracing the metaphor of a human world out of order to provoke reflection on our own post-pandemic existence. 

Premiere
15 - 19 Nov 2023
Abbotsford Convent
Australia

Playful rituals summoning a Thirsty Tea Monster through Butoh; Japanese dance and fun masks and objects making!

This is a short and fun workshop, introducing Butoh in a playful and family-friendly way. The participants will create also the art installations with everyday objects to jump headfirst into a world of transformation and shape-shifting, unleashing their inner creatures.

Following the success of last year's ButohOUT performance (nominated by Green Room Awards for Best Dance Ensemble 2021), Blessed Chaos explores beauty in distortion with site-specific performances involving visual arts, voice and video installation.

Premiere
24 - 27 Nov 2022
Abbotsford Convent
Australia

This workshop encourages seniors, elders, aunties, uncles, grandmas and grandpas to come along with your youngsters, as long as the ages together add up to 50+, 60+, 70+ and more!! (e.g. a 30 year old daughter/son with their parents/relatives/friends)

This is a short and fun workshop, introducing Butoh in a playful and family-friendly way. The participants will create also the art installations with everyday objects to jump headfirst into a world of transformation and shape-shifting, unleashing their inner creatures.

Originally a subversive non-art form, passionately expressing ugliness and beauty, the word Kabuki comes from the word ‘Kabuku’ meaning ‘bent’ or ‘out of the ordinary’. This WEEKLY workshop channels anarchic forms of Butoh and preliminary Kabuki to unleash the weird from within.

Local Butoh practitioner and researcher Helen Smith will guide the workshop, as well as having special international guests from Japan, Seisaku (one of the last disciples of atsumi Hijikata) and Dai Matsuoka (a member of Sankaijuku) via Zoom, facilitated by Yumi Umiuare.

Exploring ButohOUT! 2022's artistic theme of KaBuKu (bent and out of the ordinary), the participants will be encouraged to expand their limits, embrace the positive sensation of being 'twisted' and 'untwisted' both physically and metaphorically, in order to gain a deeper sense of liberation in our twisted realities.