Classes in Berlin: our principal location is Backsteinboot Art Studios., Eiswerder Island, Spandau, Berlin.

Upcoming Workshops:

21 October 2026, 3.00 -7.00pm

Venue details on sign-up

Exchange: 150 € | 120 € Early Sign up

Where do Butoh dance, Tai Chi Chuan, and Baguazhang meet?

In their first collaborative workshop, Butoh Mutations founder, Dominique Savitri Bonarjee and Yunuen Rhi, founder of Isuini Martial Healing Arts, guide participants into exploring how the principle of Qi– gas/fuel – in Daoist martial arts, can provide the ground for personal movement research, and a powerful foundation for developing butoh dance techniques.

Butoh dance aspires to a ‘technique of no technique’: a process of training the body to be attentive and vigilant, responsive and available, to being moved by the dance of the inner landscape. Tai Chi Chuan is a martial art that hones the body as a symbiotic energy system, working on inner alchemy and transmutation, to guide outer relationships, strategy, and skills. Baguazhang is an internal martial art that unites the mind, spirit and body through a circular movement training for elevated combat and self-healing. It trains how to strengthen blood and Qi and therefore how to keep the body system in balance.

In this workshop, we’re exploring how learning to move by ‘taking the element of air into account’ can open the relationship to space, time and inner rhythm that helps stimulate physical and imaginative strength.

The two guides met in Berlin, and finding resonances in their journeys, they weave together their knowledge of dance, martial arts and wisdom traditions, to offer this unique workshop.

Dancing Butoh, when 'we can't breathe'

Butoh Mutations as a pedagogical project, expands Butoh’s visceral postwar inquiry to contemporary questions of embodiment. The aim is to faithfully transmit the teachings of Japanese Butoh masters by venturing upstream from Butoh, to work with imagery and practice pointers from ancient embodied knowledge traditions. In this portion of the workshop Savitri will guide us into the ‘breath landscape’, a technique of noticing energetic polarity through the development of inner ‘quantum’ attention. We practice entering states of radical presence and exposure in improvisation and spontaneous dance creation.

The Baguazhang portion of the workshop will teach the conjunction of structural alignment, Qi flow and breathing through the circle walk foundations. These include linear walk, change of direction and applications. Partner drills will explore the intersections of grounding and redirecting an opponents’ power.

The workshop is open to movers, performers, artists, from different backgrounds and levels of experience, including dance, theatre, live art, martial arts and somatic practices – as well as anyone curious about performance, creativity and expressiveness.

The workshop combines breathwork, guided practices, improvisation techniques, partner work.

About the Guides

Dominique Savitri Bonarjee (PhD) is an artist and researcher, drawing on over 20 years of training in ritual and embodied knowledge traditions. She is the author of “Butoh, as Heard by a Dancer” (Routledge, 2024), an oral history account of her intensive research and transmissions received from seminal first and second generation Butoh dancers while living in Japan. Savitri’s ongoing movement process includes completing an apprenticeship with UK-based Integral Tai Chi to become an instructor, and 4th generation lineage holder in the Wudang Tai Chi lineage of Cheng Tin Hung; she has been initiated to the dancing dervish Sufi Mevlevi lineage of the Study Society for Nonduality; studied sacred dance and song traditions from the Indian subcontinent. Her doctoral thesis in contemporary art practice entitled ‘Space of the Nameless’ (Goldsmiths University of London) constructs a physical and intuitive methodology for artistic research and collaborative processes of knowledge creation.

spaceofthenameless.art / Substack: namelessbody

Yunuen Rhi M.A. is a fifth generation Ma Gui Baguazhang instructor, consultant, artist, body worker and writer. Their work bridges Bagua practice’s transformational principles, two bone setting methods, ceremonial medicine work, and performance art to support deep regenerative structural embodiment. As a fifth-generation Ma Gui Baguazhang instructor they have trained with Chinese masters since 2010 and have taught in Berlin and Los Angeles since 2014 and 2017 respectively. They do active research on the body as a source of regeneration and internal power through additional sustained training in Yang family Tai Chi, Philippino martial arts, Butoh, Balinese and Mexica dance. They are currently finishing an involved manuscript about their practice.

isuini.com

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