BUTOH Batorū

Butoh Batoru returns to Säule — stripped, raw, and built as a machine of bodies, sound, and real-time confrontation.

The core structure remains: singular → dual → collective.

Every pairing is drawn live by MC Coco Katsura, keeping the system unstable and unpredictable from start to finish.

This edition expands the field with a continuous techno duel by Dasha Rush b2b Mieko Suzuki, and a lineup built on the principle of only new faces — including dancers and performers operating on the edges of butoh, hybrid forms, and underground movement research.

Over two hours, 14 improvisations by 8 performers unfold through escalating formats:

1vs1 exposures,

2vs2 frictions,

4vs4 swarm formations.

Inside Säule’s concrete pressure — low frequencies, shadow cuts, proximity and rupture — the night becomes a real-time system studying tension, decay, and emergence.

Nothing is choreographed. Nothing loops back. Everything burns at the moment it appears.

LIVE PERFORMANCE: UNHUMAN feat. VALENTIN TSZIN — “ANATOMY IN DISTORTION”

A live intervention built from shared history inside Berlin’s darker underground.

Unhuman dissects rhythm into distortion — rupture mechanics, skin becoming static, pulse devoured and reassembled.

Valentin Tszin enters as counter-force, channeling the memory of an era when the two shaped events like Liber Null across Berlin and beyond.

Together they construct a field where sound and body grind against each other — a stripped anatomy of impact, nostalgia, and transformation.

BATTLE PARTICIPANTS (alphabetical order)

Gleb Bondarev

Gleb Bondarev is a dancer, performer, and filmmaker whose work integrates contemporary dance, physical theatre, and urban movement with visual composition. Trained in both education and dance—with studies in film at Darmstadt University and dance at the University of Music and Dance Cologne—he has performed in award-winning productions such as “M | Я” (SoloDuo Festival winner, Aerowaves 2026 recommendation). His artistic practice combines choreographic precision with cinematic thinking, generating layered physical images that shift between abstraction, narrative tension, and emotional resonance. Bondarev works as a freelance artist and member of the Ilona Pászthy Dance Company.

Leon Dziemaszkiewicz

Krzysztof Leon Dziemaszkiewicz is a Polish-born, Berlin-based trans-disciplinary artist whose work spans performance, choreography, installation, and sculptural object-making. Using materials like adhesive tape and recycled waste, he constructs visceral environments that explore animality, gender fluidity, and the dissolution of human boundaries. His practice is rooted in transformation and the merging of opposites, embracing trans-sexual and trans-genical perspectives to investigate freedom, identity, and emotional intensity. Leon’s performances blur the line between creature and human, ritual and theatre, crafting raw states of presence that challenge conventional understandings of the body.

Mad Kate

Mad Kate is a Berlin-based conceptual performer, writer, and vocalist whose project Mad Kate | The Tide blends post-punk, spoken word, contact mic experimentation, and raw movement into politically charged, queer, sex-positive performance environments. Working with Jacopo Bertacco and Sara Neidorf, the trio creates hybrid sonic worlds that unpack themes of labor, intimacy, war, identity, and digital presence. Their work—including the multimedia project ALIVE:ness—examines how presence is formed and fractured across physical, emotional, and virtual spaces, questioning what connection and embodiment mean in an era of shifting identities and mediated relationships.

Kupra

Kupra is a Belarusian dancer and performer based in Germany with over two decades in the international hip-hop scene, specializing in Hip-Hop, House, Locking, and Popping. Since 2016, she has expanded her practice into theatre and contemporary performance, collaborating with institutions such as Theater für Niedersachsen and Museum Folkwang. Her work bridges urban dance, storytelling, and political inquiry, often addressing social tension, identity, and resistance. Kupra recontextualizes street-dance vocabularies through embodied dramaturgy, creating performances that move between explosive physicality and reflective emotional presence.

Sofya Shaikut

Sofya Shaikut is a butoh dancer, choreographer, and performative philosopher whose work explores the human impulse to transcend oneself and inhabit other beings, images, and rhythms. She has presented work internationally—from classical theatre festivals and museums to contemporary butoh platforms—and collaborated with critical art collectives such as Chto Delat. Engaging both body and theory, she co-authored Dionysos and Apollo after Nihilism, investigating transformation and becoming. Her performances function as invitations into fluid states, where identity dissolves and the body becomes an unstable terrain shaped by intuition, imagination, and philosophical inquiry.

Yuri Shimaoka

Yuri Shimaoka is a Japanese dancer, ballet teacher, and Shiatsu practitioner whose training bridges ballet, Japanese martial arts, and research with The Forsythe Company under Yoko Ando. Based in Berlin since 2015, she collaborates across performance, film, VR, and installation, with projects presented at the 10th Berlin Biennale, YCAM InterLab, and in works by Okwui Okpokwasili and Ersan Mondtag. She is co-founder of Considering, a collective focused on mutual support and somatic politics of care. Yuri’s practice explores how movement can generate collective regulation, healing, and nuanced states of shared embodiment.

Stefano Taiuti

Stefano Taiuti is an Italian-born, Berlin-based performer and movement researcher whose background includes training with key butoh figures such as Masaki Iwana, Akira Kasai, Min Tanaka, and Yoko Muronoi. Active since the early 2000s, he founded the LIOS Butoh Collective and curated Rome’s long-running festival Trasform’azioni. His work intersects butoh, physical theatre, underground culture, and spatial dramaturgy, generating performances in festivals, techno contexts, galleries, and unconventional sites across Europe. Taiuti’s practice centers on transformation, corporeal imagery, and the porous boundaries between presence and disappearance, treating the body as a charged field of metamorphosis.

Min Yoon

Min Yoon creates intimate, surreal, and psychosomatic performances merging post-butoh dance with experimental vocal work. Her improvisations draw from subconscious impulses, ritual stillness, and emotionally heightened physicality to reveal complex relational states and unresolved inner tensions. Working with collage-like imagery and intuitive movement, Min examines whether butoh can shed its inherited wounds and evolve as a form that responds to the urgencies of contemporary life. Her practice asks what dances are needed now—beyond language, beyond tradition, and beyond the limitations placed on bodies by culture and history.