Frequency In Motion – Photo by Elias Hill
Audio Visual Butoh Performance: Frequency in Motion
Featuring Atsushi Takenouchi, Hiroko Komiya and Chris H.Lynn.
In conjunction with Asheville Butoh Dance Festival 2025
Thursday, October 30th, 2025 at 7:30 pm
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center {120 College Street}
TICKETS – $15 General Admission / $10 for BMCM+AC Members + Students w/ ID
Asheville Butoh Festival, in collaboration with Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center and the University of North Carolina at Asheville, presents its 15th annual festival from October 30 – November 2. BMCM+AC will host Frequency in Motion, an audiovisual performance featuring Butoh dancers: Atsushi Takenouchi, Jenni Cockrell, Julie Becton Gillum, and Constance Humphries. Dancers will be accompanied by live sounds, field recordings, and objects by Chris H.Lynn and Hiroko Komiya. Visuals, including Super 8 and digital film, are by Chris H.Lynn.
Atsushi Takenouchi began his Butoh journey in 1980 with the Hoppo-Butoh-ha company in Hokkaido. His final piece with the company, Takazashiki (1984), was created with the direct guidance of Butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata. In 1986, he created his own path: Jinen Butoh — as a universal expression of nature, earth, and ancient memories, embracing the rhythms of life itself. From 1996 to 1999, embarked on a three-year Jinen tour across Japan, performing over 600 site-specific improvisations rooted in natural landscapes and sacred spaces. Around this time, he learned the spirit of the universe of Kazuo Ohno and Yoshito Ohno.
Since 2002, based in Europe, working on solo Butoh and collaboration projects with dancers and actors, with giving workshops internationally.
His presence extends into film, notably ‘Ridden by Nature’, an award-winning environmental art dance film by Kiah Keya. From 2015 to 2020, he directed an intensive Jinen Butoh school in Italy. Today, he devotes himself fully to transmitting Jinen Butoh through seasonal intensive workshops held both in nature and studio spaces — living his art as a continuous dialogue with life itself. In 2021, compiling these experiences into a book, he published Atsushi Takenouchi Jinen Butoh writing of his Butoh life, workshop contents and his Butoh performance works.
Frequency In Motion – Photo by Elias Hill
Hiroko Komiya is a sound artist who transmutes the ephemeral – air, space, movement, bodily sensation, and memory – into boundless sonic expressions beyond conventional melody and rhythm. Since 1999, she has been the principal musical collaborator for Atsushi Takenouchi’s JINEN Butoh, and has provided live accompaniment for his performances and workshops worldwide.
Her artistic reach extends beyond Butoh, engaging in multidisciplinary collaborations with filmmakers, sculptors, painters, poets, costume designers, and performers for exhibitions and installations. In 2022, she performed an 11-hour tribute performance to Félix Guattari (French psychoanalyst and philosopher) in Paris, alongside Ramuntcho Matta’s art music collective and Atsushi Takenouchi. In 2021, she embarked on a new project with US film/sound artist Chris H. Lynn, creating audiovisual performances with Butoh dancers, performed in Vienna, Warsaw, Barcelona, Mexico city, Hong Kong, Athens and Kumano, Japan.
Chris H. Lynn is a filmmaker, sound artist from the United States. His digital images and Super 8 films explore the subtle rhythms of movement, light, and sound in urban and rural landscapes that vary from the Eastern shores of Maryland, U.S. to Nanjing, China. His work has been shown at the Librairie Avant-Garde, Nanjing, China, UNZALAB in Milan, Italy, American Film Institute (AFI) in Silver Spring, Md, Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinamericano Habana, Cuba, Goethe Institut, Washington D.C., The Anthology Film Archives, NYC, and a variety of venues internationally. His work was featured in the book Cinema and the Audiovisual Imagination by Robert Robertson. He currently hosts the monthly radio program Beyond Encounters on Camp Radio. His sound works have been published on Impulsive Habitat, Verz Imprint, Green Field Recordings, Kandala Records, Plus Timbre and echOmusic and have appeared on radio programs worldwide.
The Asheville Butoh Collective serves as a hub for the creative work of Julie Becton Gillum, Jenni Cockrell, Rebecca Schoenecker, and Constance Humphries, as well as the Asheville Butoh Festival, which is entering its 15th season. The collective brings together diverse artists with over seventy-five cumulative years of professional dancing, choreographing, collaborating, and teaching.
Butoh History
Originating in post-WWII Japan, butoh is a potent and revolutionary dance form. Butoh uses the body brazenly as a battleground to attain personal, social, or political transformation. In its early forms, butoh embraced and referenced Western artistic movements; German Expressionism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Existentialism, and Fluxus, all of which pervaded the Tokyo underground and the avant-garde arts scene at that time. In fact, the cofounders of butoh, Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, trained in German modern dance, which was integral to the development of German Expressionism. But, eventually, they took opposite approaches to their dance making. Hijikata’s work became known as ankoku butoh (dance of utter darkness), and he embraced the grotesque and the absurd, exploring themes of sacrifice, struggle, and death. Ohno’s butoh was playful, humorous, and filled with light and life. Today’s butoh is influenced by both Hijikata and Ohno and wrestles to balance those contrary approaches. Philosophically, butoh slips between the cracks of definition in order to reveal the fervent beauty of the unique human spirit.