With the On Display residency, Min will translate post butoh dance performance Relume: ignite again into a cinematic experience. How can the tense subtleties, the gaze, and atmospheric heaviness and release be translated beyond the space in flesh? While butoh dance is typically filmed with classic archetypal visuals and with white paint. Min’s post/butoh dance is a felt experience of tremors in the body and abstract relations with body, space, and music. With their musician collaborator, Wieland Möller and the LAKE crew, Min will explore how to capture in film — the visible and visceral relationship between performers’ bodies, body parts, and music, the effects of long duration on performers, and the choreography of space and light.
Relume: ignite again has been performed at Dock11, mountainside in Poland, and Tanzmit, an outdoors festival at Potsdamer Platz. With the filming process, Min will also depict the body in crises in different sites in and out of the studio, to transgress the body beyond the stage.
Relume: ignite again
post/butoh dance by Min Yoon
gong/drums/electronics by Wieland Möller
“Relume” is a structured improvisation of post/butoh dance and music exploring clashes, frictions, and deep simmerings in personal, relational, and collective FIRE. Each collision and overlay mirror inner landscapes of boundaries, conflict, and holding within chaos. Percussive elements of drums and gongs are modified, stimulated, and extended by electronics, in states of overwhelm and compression. Ancient and contemporary senses of nature are posed as opposing archetypes in play.
about post/butoh dance
From Self-Erasure to Self-Exposure, Min describes their method as post/butoh dance, expanding butoh dance with hyper-exposure of the self, social questions, and embodied research. Min dances with the question of whether butoh dance is mimicking patterns of oppression, and… what is the dance needed today.
In their first residency at LAKE Studios, they were invited to articulate… “What is post/butoh dance?”
Min researched post/butoh dance as a living tradition, evolving and reflecting on former performance scores, and documenting new impulses in the body. How does a form reject/renew/re-member a dance form / philosophy originally created to reject?
In the studio, Min researched what is at the edges of butoh dance, toward post/butoh dance… looking at extreme states as doorways into the personal and transcendental, different depictions of the human as personal and collective, and new images and archetypes for our times reflecting back at historical horror, and the overwhelm of current polycrises.
about Min
With post/butoh dance, vocals, and philosophy, Min Yoon makes intimate, surreal, and psychophysical performances and experimental moments of heightened complex / relational emotions. Min’s dance collages intense imagery, physicality, stillness, and ritual. “Not for the attention-seeking economy”, Min’s works process what feels more subconscious /unknown in being human such as around pain and violence, to grieve, reveal nuanced truths around the depths of emotions, experiences, and perspectives, and look for new expressions.
Min’s art works have been funded by NATIONALES PERFORMANCE NETZ (npn) in Germany, Dachverband Tanz Deutschland, Musikfonds, Kultuuri Kaupilla in Finland, The City of Oakland, The Battery Club of San Francisco, and the Awesome Foundation, with other artist residencies and grants. Min has also been a fellow at Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (ZK/U Berlin) and an artcorps scholar at the Tamalpa Institute founded by Daria and Anna Halprin.