Earth Tomes
ONE NIGHT ONLY
Sunday, March 15, 2026
Hairpin Arts Center, 2810 N Milwaukee Ave, 2nd Floor, Chicago
Doors 7pm, performance 7:30pm
TICKETS

Earth Tomes is a birth; she enters as a tree and emerges as a body turned to earth.

Co-directed by Joan Laage & Sharkey Zalek
Featuring twelve extraordinary butoh dancers: Cristal Sabbagh, Wannapa Pimtong-Eubanks, Aja Singletary, Helen Lee, Joan Gutiérrez, Corin Wiggins, Keiko Johnson, Elaine Lemieux, Aurora Tabar, Harlan Rosen, Sharkey Zalek, and Joan Laage

Live sound by Norman W. Long

Earth Tomes exists to bring people together to celebrate dance, to celebrate our bodies, our relationships to each other, our relationship to the Earth. The desire is to ignite a passion for these relationships in the audience. Butoh, in its essential nature, is an enigmatic dance form that highlights the body clinging to life. “When one considers the body in relation to dance, it is then that one truly realizes what suffering is: it is a part of our lives. No matter how much we search for it from the outside there is no way we can find it without delving into ourselves.” exclaimed Tatsumi Hijikata in the 1970s. If anything, we have collectively grown more aware of this human condition in these days, and Butoh dancers have now had many years of experience to model this integration.

Earth Tomes was born in 1993 in the middle of the night in an outhouse at a backcountry camp on snowy Mt. Rainier, Washington, while Joan sat listening to the sounds of nature and watching the shadows cast by her flashlight. Initially a solo work, Earth Tomes became a project as Laage began inviting other dancers to join her. Since 2016, the project has been presented with local dancers in Seattle, Upstate New York, London, Liverpool, Oslo, Warsaw, Freiburg (Germany), and Pontedera (Italy) and will be presented at the University of Colorado (Boulder) just prior to Chicago. In many ways, it has become a community-based creative process and continues to evolve as it travels. It is truly a collaborative project, working with local performers and drawing them into the creative process.

Embodying the Spirit
Butoh & Nature Workshops facilitated by Joan/Kogut
MARCH 11 & 12 (Wed & Thursday evenings) 6-10pm
The Checkout, 4116 N Clark St., Chicago

Discount for Early Birds until March 1, use EARLY to get 15% off
Register for Workshop

This workshop is a process of erasing and recreating the body through guided improvisation inspired by nature imagery. Experience training methods towards a supple body and mind and investigate aesthetics common to butoh through creative explorations.

Embodying the Spirit explores endless questions: What is life? What is the human condition? What is the body? In this workshop we will focus on imagery from the Earth Tomes Project, which has been performed in collaboration with local performers in the US and in Europe.

In this age of an increasing use of technology to direct and control so many aspects of our daily lives, a disconnect to nature can easily result. Earth Tomes is a welcome revelation of the body as earth and, through continual transformation, reveals the changing landscape of the body. Images of earth, trees, roots, stones will be layered with explorations of the elemental body (water, wind, etc.) and animals as we celebrate the body as nature.

Partner work will facilitate participants’ individual and collective journeys. The workshop draws from Joan’s training with butoh masters and her background as a Tai Chi practitioner and professional gardener. Against a dark background, the painterly light bodies of several dancers walking toward that light, with arms up.

Earth Tomes relates back to Laage’s roots in rural Wisconsin. She swam in the creeks in the summer, made igloos in the winter, traipsed through fields of cow patties, and tended a garden with her family.

She says that when she began exploring butoh, it reconnected her with her upbringing: "I felt like I was recovering my childhood, that body that was really my body . . . When I heard Goda Nario talk about Hijikata’s one tatami mat dance and the children kept in a basket, whether or not it’s true, it says something about the importance of one’s childhood experience of space."

( Joan Laage, pers. comm., January 6, 2020)

She likens her early experiences in life to her current gardening practice (and profession), and planting seeds that sprout later in life.

About Joan Laage. After studying with Butoh masters Kazuo Ohno and Yoko Ashikawa in Tokyo in the late 80s and performing with Ashikawa’s group Gnome, Joan Laage settled in Seattle and founded Dappin’ Butoh in 1990, which she directed until 2001. She is a co-founder of DAIPANbutoh Collective, which produces an annual Butoh festival. Joan performed at the Santiago, New York, Chicago, Portland, Boulder, Seattle, and Paris Butoh festivals, and a Butoh symposium at the University of California (LA). A Ph.D. in Dance & Related Arts from Texas Woman’s University, who wrote on the significance of the body in Butoh, and Certified Movement Analyst, she is featured in Sondra Fraleigh’s books – Dancing into Darkness: Butoh, Zen, and Japan and Butoh: Metamorphic Dance and Global Alchemy. Joan is also featured in Butoh America written by Tanya Calamoneri, which will be released in August 2021, and is quoted in Vangeline’s recent publication Butoh: Cradling Empty Space. She creates site-specific work for Seattle Japanese gardens annually and tours every winter/spring in Europe where she teaches and performs and continues studying under Atsushi Takenouchi. She is an avid Tai Chi practitioner with a background in traditional Asian dance/theater and a professional gardener. Since living in Krakow from 2004–2006, she has been known as Kogut (rooster). https://seattlebutoh-laage.com/

Earth Tomes

By Butoh Curious Chi

Earth Tomes

Butoh Dance performance