** Community Fundraiser to support Iván Espinosa and his dance ensemble in their overseas travel to perform "BOWELS OF THE EARTH" at the 2025 Vienna International Butoh Festival in Vienna, Austria **

With a heart full of love and gratitude, we ask for your donation and support:

HARLAN ROSEN
STEFAN BACH
CORIN WIGGINS
ARLO SAGE KING
and IVÁN ESPINOSA

💖🙏💖🙏💖🙏

Dear friends, family, and artistic peers,

We are delighted to announce that we have been invited as an ensemble to perform Iván's new choreography titled "BOWELS OF THE EARTH" in Vienna, Austria for their fifth-annual Butohresque: Vienna Butoh Festival in October 2025. For all five of us, this is our first-time-ever performing a Butoh dance production in Europe, so we are asking for donations from the community to help support us in bringing our ecology and nature-themed performance to new audiences overseas!!

After well-received showings of BOWELS OF THE EARTH at the Chicago NextGen Butoh Lovers Showcase and the 2025 Salish Sea Butoh Festival earlier this year, we are moving forward in our journey to bring this environmental-themed dance work to new venues. Audiences, as well as fellow performers and artists nationwide, have resonated strongly with our performance that utilizes the art of Japanese Butoh (舞踏, Butō) and the choreographic methodology of Butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata to create a performance that evokes a primordial relationality between the human body and the earth, while inviting witnesses to meditate deeply on the fundamental interconnectedness between humans and nature.

We are now urgently raising $5,000 to support our travel to the October 2025 Vienna, Austria Butoh Festival —helping to cover housing/lodging costs, food, and local transportation in Vienna for our dancers who are working very hard to self-produce this overseas production. Your support at this moment will empower this absolutely unique project—celebrating the dynamic fusion of ecology and environmental philosophy with Butoh dance while further advancing the deep weaving of cultures, aesthetics and multicultural perspectives through the portal of global Butoh and our shared deep-time nature ancestry—to fully blossom while we continue to work to bring this piece overseas and beyond.

Several of our ensemble members come from BIPOC/minority, rural, and/or Low-income backgrounds, and have historically had little access to international performance opportunities like this one. The chance to share our artwork on an international stage, build lasting collaborations and supportive connections, and deepen cultural exchange is a rare and powerful experience—for us and for the communities we meet along the way. Please DONATE if you can... ANY AMOUNT HELPS! YOUR SUPPORT IS GREATLY APPRECIATED.

About BOWELS OF THE EARTH:

Bowels of the Earth is a meditation on the human body's connection to decomposition. The choreography takes its inspiration from a seminal text written by the founder of Butoh, Tatsumi Hijikata. Originally titled "Suijakutai no saishū", this text was delivered as a lecture by Hijikata the night before the 1985 Tokyo Butoh Festival. In this lecture, Hijikata emphasized the body's intimacy with ecological forces like wind, mud and soil and portrayed Butoh as a unique type of performed ecological knowledge that disrupts Euro-Western ideologies of Anthropocentrism, delineated corporeality and their preconditioned behaviors. A transformative experience of nature was important to Hijikata: while articulating his complex attitude toward performance, Hijikata declared that Töhoku's spring season with its abundance of mud and wet soil taught him to dance. Also, in his lecture, Hijikata touches on his concepts of "rotting ma" (kusatte iru ma) and "suijakutai" (translates to 'weak', 'decaying' or 'weakening' body), and how the performance of these concepts in Butoh reflect the coexistence of life and death.

Bowels of the Earth engages thematically and choreographically with Hijikata’s concepts of death and decomposition in the context of 21st-century ecological crises and global climate change, while embodying decomposition through the transformative power of Butoh dance. For decomposition is also the force of nature that transforms the dying human self into new organic life: we return to the soil, and become a part of the subterranean earth. How can a dance of decomposition act as a kind of ecological praxis, reminding us that we are not separate from nature and the environment nor from the decaying aspects of life in which all beings, bodies, and entities are entangled? In its descent toward the mud and sod of the earth, Butoh invites us to dance and commune with death and decomposition. In the words of Hijikata, "the dancer, through the butoh spirit, confronts the origins of his fears: a dance which crawls towards the bowels of the earth."

BOWELS OF THE EARTH -- Directed and Choreographed by Iván Espinosa.

DANCERS: Harlan Rosen, Stefan Bach, Arlo Sage King, and Corin Wiggins.

MUSIC soundtrack composed by Christopher Arnett.

COSTUME design by Hannah Compton.

Photography above by David Noble and Roxanne Nihiline (r nihiline).

Vienna Fundraiser for Bowels of the Earth INTERNATIONAL PREMIERE

By SALISH SEA BUTOH Festival

Vienna Fundraiser for Bowels of the Earth INTERNATIONAL PREMIERE

Support Harlan Rosen, Iván Espinosa, Stefan Bach, Corin Wiggins, and Arlo Sage King's travel to Vienna for their overseas Butoh performance premiere!

Team Members