Photo by Mayra Wallraff.
Butoh Curious Chi Presents
Min Yoon:
dancing-being-in-time
Min Yoon, aka “Citizen Truth,” leads a series of workshops at Links Hall from May 27th to 30th, culminating in a student performance, bam bam boom_____.
Catch her solo performance, dancing-being-in-time, Saturday, May 31st at 7pm.
“Not for the attention-seeking economy,” Min’s butoh + experimental dance and vocal works process what feels more subconscious and unknown in being human such as around pain and violence, to grieve, reveal nuanced truths around the depths of emotions, experiences, and perspectives, and look for new expressions.
TICKETS
Student Performance FREE RSVP
Performance admission $15-$50
dancing-being-in-time
Min’s butoh + experimental dance and vocal works process what feels more subconscious and unknown in being human such as around pain and violence, to grieve, reveal nuanced truths around the depths of emotions, experiences, and perspectives, and look for new expressions. Recent works switch between researching violence with their own body and the bodies of others. dancing-being-in-time depicts loops of movements, vocal tremors, and memories, with the body as an archive of pain, states, and transformation. In dancing with violence, they researched the bodily memories of violence of another dancer to create an auditory theater piece that invites the listeners to move and lightly embody the experiences poetically.
“Not for the attention-seeking economy," a slow evolution over the span of years is compressed into this single hour. It enters the body as a living archive of pain: What impulses have been inherited, imposed, or reclaimed? How is pain danced in the same body across time?
The voice amplifies and permeates the silent screams of the body into sonic spells, into an opening. Like looking into the eyes of someone who understands, across memories, across invisible barriers of the body, beneath the skin — where impulses will not remain silent.
Motion stretches and fractures, tracing the invisible weight of memory, the tension between forgetting and remembering. Between presence and absence, between what is seen and what is felt, Dancing-Being-in-Time invites the audience into a space where movement and sound reveal what words cannot—where experience unfolds not in narrative, but in the textures of time itself.
This dance research and performance is supported by Tanzmit Festival, DIS-TANZ SOLO Funding – Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media in the NEUSTART KULTUR program, DIS-TANZEN aid program of the Dachverband Tanz Deutschland, Germany.
Opening musical set
by Liv Mershon and special guests Wannapa P. Eubanks and Sara Zalek improvising movement.
Photo by Sarah Elizabeth Larson
Through stylistic shifts and multimedia, Liv Mershon's work blurs the line between real and fantastic, exploring the emotional, absurd, painful, and beautiful at once. Her musical performances journey as dreams do, drawing chaotic narrative toward spiritual integration- with tones and textures that penetrate. Mershon is a Chicago based artist who performs with the harsh ambient duo, nunn, and co-organizes the Tierras Sonidas Sonic Rodeo in Marfa, TX. She recorded and produced nunn's releases- distributed by Damien Records, Trouble in Mind Records, and Death Bed Tapes.
Photo by Phillip Tawanchaya
Wannapa Pimtong-Eubanks is a *Butoh Artist, choreographer, movement coach, improviser, and actor. Her work often stems from a personal experience or a specific memory that grows into a poetic image that she imbues with the memory of the moment. From 2010-2021, Wannapa had been a former Artistic member of Erasing the Distance, a non-profit arts organization based in Chicago that uses the power of performance to disarm stigma, spark dialogue, educate, and promote healing surrounding issues of mental health. Since then, she has been passionately focusing on exploring relationship between mental condition and movement. Her recent work, she was a Butoh dancer in Harlan Rosen's "Arboring:Winter" in March 2025, and Ivan-Daniel Espinosa's "BOWELS OF THE EARTH" in the NextGen Butoh Lovers Showcase in April, 2025. Stay tune for more of her upcoming Butoh performances this Summer. "I'm so excited and looking forward to dancing with the awesome Sara, and Liv (musician & performer). Especially, I'd love to dedicate tonights performance to Links Hall."
Photo by Ricardo Adame
Sara Zalek (@01saratonin) is a transdisciplinary artist, producer, and curator. Rooted in physical investigations of trauma, resilience, and transformation, their work is intimate, raw, poetic. They make performances into learning situations, workshops, and sensing environments to encourage thoughtful interpersonal connections.
Through Butoh Curious Chi, Zalek connects national and international teaching artists with Chicago art makers across genres in the independent and fringe arenas (including dance, butoh, physical theater, experimental and improvisational music). They create opportunities for positive communication and arts integration using workshops, performances, and conversations about personal and collective body.
bam bam boom ____
post/butoh workshops with Min Yoon at Links Hall
SCHEDULE
Tuesday, May 27, 1:30pm-5pm
Wednesday, May 28, 1:30pm-5pm
Thursday, May 29, 6:30pm-10pm
Friday, May 30, 6:30pm-10pm
Student Performance on Sunday, June 1st, 6pm at Links Hall
Butoh ritual performance for workshop participants.
This will be a FREE butoh ritual performance and a night of community, optional as movers will also have the chance to be witnessed by the group of dancers as part of the workshop on Friday as well. Students are welcome to participate in one or multiple days. All bodies are welcome, interested in exploring depths with movement. Practices are open for all levels of experience and differently-abled bodies. Links Hall is ADA accessible.
///What does it mean to dance ~ with impulses of rupture, love, subtle and global disruptions… violence… not as destruction, but as natural impulses, process, and transformation? Finding space and metaphors for pain that is pained again, fragmented and replayed grief, rage against injustice, long exhaustion from defense that turns into something hard and twisted --- is there movement, connection, and healing as a natural impulse from our bodies?
In this Butoh dance workshop experience, we will explore the body as a site of questioning and researching, where the internal, relational, and in the group body — can be explored, confronted, expressed, and move to something else _________? Using the language of the expressive arts with butoh dance, somatics, nature, philosophy, and conflict studies... we’ll dance as a way of knowing... Is gentleness and care the dance needed for our times of polarity and awareness of violence around the world? What is the dance needed in a world of constant microaggressions, polarized thought, and suppressed emotions? There will be guided improvisation, reflective dialogue, and Butoh’s raw, poetic movement language, we will move with trajectories of emotion and dance between opposing truths. Dance with vulnerability, and experiment with our relationship with, next to various human tendencies, and find new patterns in how we can move alone and with one another.
Deeply Playful. Fun.
Strange kinds of Beauty.
I see You. You see Me.
ABOUT MIN YOON
Photo by Thuong Dang.
With post/butoh dance, vocals, and conflict studies, Min makes intimate, surreal, and psychosomatic performances and experimental moments to create moments of heightened complex / relational emotions, permission to go there, go deep, and look for what is emerging now. Min explores difficult truths beyond language, and against inherited social knowledge, through researching and dancing with unintentional/subconscious movements within impulsive improvisation, physicality, and stillness.
Min’s performances and social artworks have been funded by NATIONALES PERFORMANCE NETZ (npn) in Germany, Dachverband Tanz Deutschland, Kultuuri Kaupilla in Finland, The City of Oakland, The Battery Club of San Francisco, and the Awesome Foundation, with other artist residencies and grants. Min has also been a fellow at Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (ZK/U Berlin) and an artcorps scholar at the Tamalpa Institute founded by Daria and Anna Halprin.