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The Slowest Wave in Minneapolis

  • New City Center 3104 16th Avenue South Minneapolis, MN, 55407 United States (map)

The Slowest Wave

Vangeline

Saturday, August 16 · 7:30 - 8:30pm CDT.

Doors at 7pm

Location

New City Center

3104 16th Avenue South Minneapolis, MN 55407

Vangeline — The Slowest Wave

Renowned performer Vangeline brings her acclaimed piece “The Slowest Wave” to MPLS.

The Slowest Wave. Choreographed and performed by Vangeline

An award-winning project combining butoh and neuroscience supported by a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Dance Award, The Slowest Wave explores the thematic of waves as a symbol of femininity and female sensuality.

Read more at www.vangeline.com/the-slowest-wave

The Slowest Wave was recently featured in the New York Times. The choreography was uniquely informed by the protocol established for a scientific pilot study researching the impact of butoh on brain activity. For the groundbreaking art-science study, dancers' brain activity was recorded at the University of Houston, Texas. Results were then disseminated in scientific journals.

Learn more about this science project at https://www.vangeline.com/research

60 minutes.

$20

Vangeline is a teacher, dancer, and choreographer specializing in Japanese butoh. She is the artistic director of the Vangeline Theater/New York Butoh Institute (New York), a dance company firmly rooted in the tradition of Japanese butoh while carrying it into the twenty-first century.

With her all-female dance company, Vangeline’s socially conscious performances tie together butoh and activism. Vangeline is the founder of the New York Butoh Institute Festival, which elevates the visibility of women in butoh, and the festival Queer Butoh. She pioneered the award-winning, 18-year running program The Dream a Dream Project, which brings butoh dance to incarcerated men and women at correctional facilities across New York State.

Vangeline firmly believes that Butoh can be an instrument of personal and collective transformation in the 21st century. This transformation comes from holding a mirror to each other and integrating our many facets–the beautiful and the ugly; and from reintegrating the forgotten of our society into our midst. 

Her choreographed work has been performed in Chile, Hong Kong, Germany, Italy, Denmark, France, Finland, Mexico, the UK, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan. Vangeline is a 2022/2023 Gibney Dance Dance in Process residency and the winner of a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Dance Award for The Slowesr Wave. She is also a 2018 NYFA/NYSCA Artist Fellow in Choreography for Elsewhere (a work that began as an artistic commission from Surface Area Dance Theatre with support from the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation and the Heritage Lottery Fund UK); the winner of the 2015 Gibney Dance Social Action Award as well as the 2019 Janet Arnold Award from the Society of Antiquaries of London.

Her work as an educator, choreographer, and curator has been supported by The National Endowment for the Arts, Japan Foundation, New York Department of Cultural Affairs, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York Council on the Arts, and Asian American Arts Alliance.

Vangeline’s performances have been heralded in publications such as the New York Times (“captivating”) and Los Angeles Times (“moves with the clockwork deliberation of a practiced Japanese Butoh artist”) to name a few.

Widely regarded as an expert in her field, Vangeline has taught at Cornell University, New York University, Brooklyn College, CUNY, Sarah Lawrence, Duke University, and Princeton University (Princeton Atelier). Film projects include a starring role alongside actors James Franco and Winona Ryder in the feature film by director Jay Anania, 'The Letter" (2012-Lionsgate). 

In recent years, she has been commissioned by triple Grammy Award-winning artists Esperanza Spalding, Skrillex, and David J. (Bauhaus). She is the author of the critically-acclaimed book: Butoh: Cradling Empty Space, which explores the intersection of butoh and neuroscience. She pioneered the first neuroscientific study of Butoh (“The Slowest Wave”). Her work is the subject of CNN’s “Great Big Story” "Learning to Dance with your Demons.” She is featured on BBC’s podcast Deeply Human with host Dessa (episode 2 of 12: Why We Dance) and is the host of the podcast Butoh Musing With Vangeline.

She is currently developing the duet MAN WOMAN with her Butoh dance partner Akihito Ichihara from the renowned butoh company Sankai Juku.