Reimagining Butoh: At 136 Goethe Lab 9 FEBRUARY to 5 APRIL 2026

ABOUT

Reimagining Butoh: At 136 Goethe Lab responds to the limited time, space, and structural support available for niche, body-based practices such as Butoh in Singapore. The residency provides emerging members of the Singapore Butoh Collective with dedicated studio access, resources, and a shared research environment to develop interdisciplinary methodologies beyond commercial or pedagogical pressures.

The programme hosts seven members of the Singapore Butoh Collective in a shared, open residency, where divergent practices, ideologies, and influences gather in proximity. The lab functions as a site of research and encounter, supporting sustained experimentation and collective inquiry.

Designed as a temporary home for artistic research, the programme supports diverse entry points into Butoh and encourages artists to experiment, reflect, and refine practices that are locally grounded and collectively informed. Each residency culminates in a small public gesture—such as a research presentation, performance, or performance-lecture—and a workshop, extending individual research into public-facing moments of exchange.

The residency is supported by a temporary Butoh Library and participatory events including discussion circles and film screenings. Supported by the Goethe-Institut as part of the open call programme for 136 Goethe Lab, the project contributes to a more transdisciplinary, critically engaged, and evolving contemporary arts ecosystem in Singapore.

Residency Topics

Systems Upgrade: Butoh as cybernetics | Sharyfairy

Human body as immaculate technology, movement as code. Butoh as critical practice to interrogate and reprogram the systemic glitches of normalized behaviours.

The project initiates an ongoing effort to construct a cybernetic framework for Butoh as a diagnostic system that deconstructs habitual actions and reframes them as dance. This iteration examines dysfunctional feedback loops of doom-scrolling and selfie-taking, analyzing these pathological and performative rituals that pull hyper-sensing, self-aware bodies away from optimal states.

By activating the body’s energetic circuitry and musculoskeletal mechanics, we develop algorithms as a form of generative butoh-fu to translate these gestures into a dance that flickers within the familiar abnormality of contemporary life.

Re-discovering Melaka Kristang movement tradition through the lens of Butoh dance | Elden Zachery

Elden uses Butoh as the bodily language to patchwork and speculate about the lost “Orsang de Horas” martial art of the Melaka Kristang people. Through research via literature, stories and interviews, Elden wants to parallel the lost art to their own Butoh practice, and negotiate with the big “why” around their deep draw to movement practice and investigate Butoh’s role in bodily ancestral remembrance to piece together a story about a lost Southeast Asian tradition, epigenetics and coming home.

Snake, Siren, Succubus: Re-presenting 妖 through a feminine and animistic semiotics of Butoh | Sonia Kwek

The Chinese character for demon “妖” (yao) features a female component “女” (nu), reflecting the tendency to associate evil with the female form, or to other the female as a kind of malignant force. Through delving into the mythological figures of Snake, Siren, Succubus, this research will explore physical vocabularies, movement textures and imagistic qualia to conceive of re-presenting 妖. This is also a continuation of my ongoing deconstruction/remixing of female archetypes as a way to examine femininity, through the lens of my context as a Singaporean Chinese who identifies as Femme.

This inquiry will also begin to articulate an animistic and feminine semiotics of Butoh, which I believe is already inherent in its techniques. Through symbolic bodily transformation, the embodying of hybrid, non-human forms and the dismantling of conventional portrayals of female sexuality and beauty, Butoh is able to excavate and express a deeper understanding of the entanglement of demon and female/feminine, perhaps revealing more into why “all human societies have a conception… of what it is about woman that is shocking, terrifying, horrific, abject” (as written in The Monstrous-Feminine by Barbara Creed).

flirting with the cosmos | Tan Weiying

the work parallels the cycles of birth and decay with cosmic creation and destruction, specifically amongst stars and black holes. It is a research on how the body’s transformations can mirror the rhythms of the cosmos.

chasing crescent moon | Liz Sergeant

An Exploration into Technical Improvisation

The performer moves through time and lines, maintaining presence and technical awareness. The eyes hold weight, like the posture. Our vestibular system plays games, bodies follow synapses. Stimuli rushes in, people, lights, sounds. An unmoored dancer is lost, yet the freedom to express is found in the moment. Butoh encourages singular joy in being from one moment to the next, performance syntax enables this state, as does improvisational leeway.

This inquiry asks: what structures can arise in choreography that attend to both the mechanics of impulse and sustained concentration and articulation, allowing for a more controlled process of improvisation?

The intention is to develop choreographic scaffolds that support improvisational responsiveness and explore the nuanced interplay between internal sensation and external stimulus.

Cosmic Flesh: Elements in Transit | Kansh

This research is a development of a performance work about elements in the celestial and embodied sense. Elements are the basic structure of the Universe and show up in various Eastern practices, philosophies and mythologies. This inquiry will align with Kansh’s background in spiritual practices like Reiki, Vedic astrology and tarot along with movement and Butoh.

Unpacking Performativity and Presence through Butoh and Vogue Femme | Josh Tirados

this is not an attempt to merge but to simply learn and enrich the future of my body. acknowledging that there is no true mastery of a skill but only equipping of the self, out of love and devotion for the form. this is respectful enjoyment of the practice, of the part that adds to the whole. i am interested in feeding my body a vocabulary it finds beautiful.

My practice explores the dialogue between Butoh’s interiority and Vogue Femme’s high-intensity performativity, investigating how presence, aura, and performative reflex emerge in contrasting movement styles—and how these qualities can be merged, juxtaposed, and played with.

In Butoh, the body does not ‘perform’ in the conventional sense; it unfolds from internal sensations, memory, and affect. Vogue Femme, by contrast, relies on deliberate gestures, poses, and theatricality to assert presence. Despite these differences, both forms generate a palpable intensity—a felt aura—that resonates with audiences.

Through this tension of slowness and precision, introspection and projection, my work examines how the body can simultaneously withdraw and command attention, opening new possibilities and strategies for performance across both forms.

Disclaimer: This research is attentive to questions of respect, lineage, and cultural ownership, particularly regarding the ballroom community, where Vogue Femme exists as a protected and closely guarded space.

SCHEDULE

OPENING PARTY @ 136 GOETHE LAB
Date: Sunday, 15 February, 2026
Time: 6-8 PM

Calling all Singapore Butoh Collective members and the public.

You’re invited to our opening party and hang-out session.

We open Reimagining Butoh at 136 Goethe Lab — a space to gather before the work begins and to introduce our residents and their practices!

Come meet the artists.
Geek out over Butoh.
Make new friends.

All are welcome.
FREE. BYOB.
Please bring snacks and drinks.

RESIDENT WORKSHOPS @ 136 GOETHE LAB

Resident: Josh Tirados
Title: Femme Queen Battle Presence with Bentli Iman
Date: Last week of February
(Instagram for exact dates)
Time: 7–10 PM
Description:
Embodying femme queen essence and wit for performance.
Workshop and dialogue about queer feminine presence using vogue femme.
Duration: 3 hours
Pricing: Free

Resident: Tan Weiying
Title: let’s romanticise the cosmos
Date: Tuesday, 3 March 2026
Time: 8–10 PM
Location: Outdoors
Description:
This is a night out into the open where we gaze into our light polluted skies and imagine the stars beyond. We experience scale through the vastness of the cosmos and let it sit within us.
A lunar eclipse is said to happen on this date too, so we may see the blood moon.
Duration: 3 hours
Pricing: Free

Resident: Elden Zachery
Title: Silva Spoon (with Coree D’Silva, Andre D’Rozario, Elanor De Silva)
Date: Friday, 27 February 2026
Time: 7–10 PM
Description:
Tasting different Kristang dishes and assigning them with sensory descriptors to inspire movement.
[Open to all]
Duration: 3 hours
Pricing: $15

Title: Kris-tongue
Date: Friday, 20 February 2026
Time: 7–10 PM
Description:
Onomatopoeic movement exploration – experimenting with face shapes around words and sounds.
[Open to all, Eurasians-focused]
Duration: 3 hours
Pricing: Free

Title: Gragok Butoh
Date: Friday, 6 March 2026
Time: 7–10 PM
Description:
A dialogue / workshop with Eurasians
Duration: 3 hours
Pricing: Free

Resident: Liz Sergeant
Title: gravity game
Date: Wednesday, 11 March 2026 and Wednesday, 18 March 2026
Description:
An improvisation needs skeletal structure to stand, and muscular imagination to move. Let’s learn to move together.
Duration: 2 hours
Pricing: $10

Resident: Sonia Kwek
Title: Women’s Circle: The Monstrous Feminine
Date: Saturday, 7 March 2026
Time: 6:30-9 PM
Description: Calling in female-identifying, trans-femme and non-binary sisters, this facilitated gathering references the rich, age-old practice of Women’s Circles. Using the Monstrous Feminine in the context of Butoh as a starting point, this is meant as a space for us to share, listen, witness, support, honour and learn from each other.
Duration: 2.5h
Pricing: Free - FEMMES ONLY

Title: Embracing 妖
Date: Sunday, 8 March 2026
Time: 3–5:30 PM
Description: Butoh was originally coined Ankoku Butoh, or the dance of darkness. How do we express the dark and feral within, yet not be engulfed by it? How do we allow our desires to reveal, not inebriate?
妖 (yao): demon, monster, strange creature
This Butoh workshop specifically looks at 妖 figures in folklore, exploring their ways of moving through the world, and how we may tap into these hidden embodied wisdoms.
Duration: 2.5h
Pricing: $20 / $15 for SBC

Resident: Kansh
Tile: Elemental Inquiry
Date: 8th March 6:30- 8:30pm
Description: Using astrological elements, we use imaginative prompts for embodied movements and inquiry.
Duration: 2 hours
Pricing:  $20 for non residents

Resident: Sharyfairy
Title: Selfie-Taking Skills Future: Butoh Face Service
Date: Saturday, 7 March 2026
Time: 3–5:30 PM
Description:
A somatic laboratory to recalibrate our faces and be ready to serve them. We dissect selfie-taking as a performance system, design new masks and discover tools to consciously navigate our technologically mediated identities.
Duration: 2.5 hours
Pricing: $15 (funds will go to performance installation production)

ARTIST PRESENTATIONS @ 136 GOETHE LAB

Saturday, 14 March 2026
Time: 7–10 PM
Elden Zachery
Sonia Kwek
Tan Weiying

Saturday, 21 March 2026
Time: 12–6 PM
Sharyfairy

Time: 7–8 PM
Tan Weiying

Saturday, 28 March 2026
Time: 6–10 PM
Liz Sergeant
Josh Tirados
Kansh

The Artists

XUE (Facilitator/Curator)

XUE is a Butoh dancer from Singapore whose art practice is informed by Butoh's involvement in Singapore’s underground arts scene as both an artist and organizer, and over a decade of experience in graphic design and pedagogy. Emerging from a life shaped by nomadism and cultural hybridity, XUE’s work explores the body in relation. In 2024, XUE founded the Singapore Butoh Collective, a community initiative dedicated to cultivating and sustaining Butoh culture in Singapore. Their life’s work is to strengthen the foundations through which future generations of artists may develop independent practices supported by this form. XUE’s ongoing training continues under Vangeline (Vangeline Theater / New York Butoh Institute) and Emiko Agatsuma (AGAXART, Japan), complemented by self-initiated research trips to Japan. XUE is currently an Associate Artist at Dance Nucleus and a recent graduate of its Certificate Programme for Critical Practice in Contemporary Performance. XUE’s performance history includes the Online New York Butoh Institute Festival (2020), Online Queer Butoh Festival (2021), and Shadowbloom (The Brick Theater, New York, 2022). In 2024, XUE presented the centre trembles, an eleven-hour Butoh performance at Singapore’s ArtScience Museum. Other highlights include Solo Butoh #3 (Surakarta), ARTJOG STAGE (Yogyakarta), Cermin Air (Movement Lab, choreographed by Agatsuma Emiko), and the Jogja Noise Bombing Festival (2024). XUE is also the cofounder of Endless Return, a local rave and music label exploring Butoh through rave-Butoh formats, awarded a T:>Works Per°Form Open Academy Fellowship. Through these engagements, XUE continues to explore how Butoh can operate as both an applied art and an embodied epistemology.

Sonia Kwek (Artist-In-Residence)

Sonia is an interdisciplinary artist who works with performance, movement and the body to create. Often involving collaboration and transdisciplinary experimentation, she performs, dramaturges, directs, choreographs, facilitates and produces across varying spaces and mediums, including stage productions, site-specific responses, short films, performance-lectures, immersive installations, nightlife gigs, workshops, etc. Sonia’s work explores corporeal sensualities, deconstructs myths/archetypes and delves into the latent unseen to deal with questions about embodiment, gender, and perception. Informed by her Intercultural Theatre training and Butoh practice, Sonia seeks to shape time-space to centre the expression and experience of the intimate, visceral and erotic.

Sonia was first struck by Butoh at 18 through videos shared by her Theatre Studies teacher. This nudged her towards university studies in Australia, where she was able to train in Butoh regularly with Zen Zen Zo Physical Theatre. Since then (2010), a lifelong Butoh practice was seeded and she continually seeks out training. Notable Butoh artists she has taken workshops with include Dairakudakan, Sankai Juku, Koichi and Hiroko Tamano, Emiko Agatsuma, Frances Barbe, Vangeline, Sasa Cabalquinto. Sonia is proud to be part of the Singapore Butoh Collective, which she credits for reigniting her fire for Butoh more boldly. Recent Butoh performances include a solo at ‘Butoh Don’t Cry #6: Birthsong’ at Enclave Bar (Singapore), April 2025 and ‘Cermin Air’, a production choreographed by Agatsuma Emiko at Movement Lab (Yogyakarta), March 2024.

Tan Weiying (Artist-In-Residence)

Weiying is a theatre maker whose practice draws from odissi and butoh. She is currently exploring the intersection of these two forms to develop a movement language of her own. 

Her journey with butoh began at the Intercultural Theatre Institute under Frances Barbe, where the intensity and vulnerability of the form opened new possibilities in her body. In 2020, she began training in odissi, which largely reshaped her understanding of movement through its rigour and intricacy. Her continued practice in butoh has given her a sense of freedom and release in movement, balancing the discipline of odissi. 

Weiying seeks to deepen her exploration of Butoh through workshops with XUE, Vangeline, Norihito Ishii, Akihito Ichihara and Yumiko Yoshioka, and continues to weave these influences into her work.

Liz Sergeant (Artist-In-Residence)

Liz is an actor who likes to move. She graduated from the Intercultural Theatre Institute in 2016, moving to work onstage and on lens. Finding herself pursuing physicality as the doorway to expression, she was introduced to butoh and Odissi early in her education, and is pursuing long term training.

Her butoh work includes debuting Butoh Don’t Cry and Chio Butoh, working and developing characters (ꪻꫝꫀ ꪑꪮᦓᦓ ꫀꪖꪻꫀ᥅ᦓ, swankeye, hungry panda) for places like the Battlebox, Enclave Bar, and Zouk. Continually moving from movement to theatre to dance to lens, she is interested in finding an adaptive, nascent body.

Kansh (Artist-In-Residence)

Kansh is drawn to modes of expression that liberate rather than dictate. Across mediums, their practice remains consistently critical of the systems and structures we’re born into - and the ones we struggle to break free from.

Kansh lives through alternate realities through art-making, creating spaces that evoke trance-like states and invite others to step beyond the familiar.

Josh Tirados (Artist-In-Residence)

Josh Tirados is a Filipino butoh dancer and performance artist, obsessed with the contrast of the performing body and the personal dance. More recently, he is interested in using the body as a subject of provocation, tapping into memory, ancestry and the salaciousness of the mind. Understanding seduction in holding space is as subtle as breathing, and most curious about intensifying presence beyond just the body, he uses performance to narrate stories of strangeness and charm.

Elden Zachery (Artist-In-Residence)

Elden Zachery is a queer Southeast Asian butoh performer and costume crafter. A patchwork of love and pain through generations and sensations - (they) were born to perform the electricity of life. A sharpened sickle, Elden is anthropologically and ancestrally driven, currently working on expanding equatorial  and sensual embodiment in their practice, with queerness, spirituality and ecology as their morningstar. The spectrum of work is wide - from campy to haunting, tinkering with avant garde and taboo - existing in film, solo and collaborative live performance, activations, photography and so on…

Sharyfairy (Artist-In-Residence)

Sharyfairy is a Singaporean experimental artist and butoh practitioner. Her transdisciplinary practice mines the rich landscape of the body as an immaculate form of technology to express the unspoken and unseen. Sharyfairy is a founding member of Southeast Asian collective and music label Strange Weather, serving as organizer, producer and installation builder. She is also a core member and planning advisor for Singapore Butoh Collective. Sharyfairy daylights as Sharon Shum, a creative operations specialist at the intersection of art and technology. She runs strategy and finance for Refraction, a global artist collective in web3 that produces events, exhibitions and creative programs.

About Us

The Singapore Butoh Collective is a young community initiative dedicated to cultivating and sustaining butoh culture in Singapore and Southeast Asia. Our aim is to build a community that embraces butoh as both an artistic practice and a critical lens—one that interrogates the cultural, social, and political conditions shaping how we move through an increasingly dehumanizing world.

We’ve created multiple platforms for our members to share their evolving practices with peers and the public in diverse settings and extend the reach of Butoh in Singapore. We run monthly community classes and butoh nights; host guest-led workshops by acclaimed teachers; and organize a biannual experimental Butoh Performance Camp in Northern Thailand. This independent residency pushes the expressive boundaries of butoh as both a visceral performance language and a refined bodily discipline, deepened through direct engagement with nature and the spirit of communal sharing.

We are interested in forging connections with Butoh communities across the region and globally—creating shared spaces where artists can learn from one another and grow the form together, across languages, geographies, and histories. We gather others who wish to explore butoh not as imitation, but as response—alive to this place and time.

A central inquiry of our work is: What does it mean to dance butoh within a constellation of cities, islands, and communities marked by colonization, capitalism, and cultural erasure—on different soil, with different ghosts? We are particularly interested in the tensions that arise when butoh encounters local histories, aesthetic frameworks, and embodied struggles. Our programming invites critical dialogue and embodied research that wrestles with these contradictions, centering reflexive, body-based inquiry. Together, we gather to move through the layered inheritances that shape us.

At present, we remain largely independent and community-funded, with recent support from *SCAPE Singapore—an urban, youth-focused arts and culture hub in the heart of Orchard Road—with whom we are a Resident Interest Group. Every program or activity we present is a labor of love, made possible only through the commitment of our community, teachers, and collaborators.

Our long-term vision is to build sustainable support for butoh in Singapore through a regular and diverse lineup of workshops, talks, and performances—featuring both respected masters and emerging voices. Over two years, we have already hosted guest workshops with internationally renowned teachers including Agatsuma Emiko (AGAXART, JP), Vangeline (New York Butoh Institute, USA), Ichihara Akihito (ELF / Sankai Juku, JP), and Norihito ISHII (Butoh ISHII Gumi / Sankai Juku, JP), along with our inaugural end-of-year community showcase.

As we shape and are shaped by this evolving form, we hold space for new questions, bodies, and possibilities. It is a joy to carry butoh forward in new ways, while remaining rooted in the richness of its lineage and history.

sgbutoh.co
Instagram: @singaporebutohcollective

The Space

136 GOETHE LAB is a project space at the Goethe-Institut Singapore. Housed in the former library and reading room, the space is intended as a response to the need for physical spaces for the arts, and an ongoing conversation with the public and arts community in Singapore.

Reimagining Butoh: At 136 Goethe Lab is supported as part of the open call for 136 GOETHE LAB, which invited applicants to activate the space with a group proposal.