The Brick Theatre
in association with New York Butoh Institute
Calla
by Shahryar Shahamat
Photo by Vangeline
March 26, 27, 28, 29
at 7pm
Brick Aux Studio
628 Metropolitan Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11211
Tickets from $20
Running time 40 minutes
Calla is a raw Butoh performance inspired by the stillness and sculptural purity of the calla lily, exploring the quiet tension between fragility and resilience found in nature and the human body. Through slow, deliberate movement and breath, the piece unfolds as a living sculpture, revealing the hidden stories we carry of grief, memory, and transformation while embodying the flower’s graceful defiance against time. It is an invitation to witness the body as a flower opening and closing, echoing the quiet strength and delicate survival of the calla lily in a world that demands constant bloom.
Shahryar Shahamat – director and Performer
Karie Laks – Set Design
Shahryar Shahamat is a multidisciplinary artist and painter, born and raised in Tehran, Iran, and based in New York City since 2010. His ongoing visual project, Human on Human, explores human expression through abstract figurative forms inspired by personal history and lived experience. Rooted in repetition, intuition, and layered emotion, Shahryar’s work captures the complexity of the human condition through raw gesture, textured surfaces, and imaginative forms.
Since 2025, Shahryar has been studying Butoh under the mentorship of Vangeline at the New York Butoh Institute, which also marked the start of their artistic collaboration. His deepening engagement with Butoh has brought new dimensions to his artistic practice, fusing movement and visual art into embodied meditations on memory, vulnerability, and transformation.
His recent Butoh performance of Human on Human at the Queer Butoh Festival 2025 was praised for its “radical stillness” and powerful visual impact. Writing for thINKingDANCE, Jen George described his presence as “an easy point of focus for an impatient eye,” highlighting the resonant calm of his onstage presence amidst a landscape of slowness and poetic minimalism.
Through Butoh, Shahryar continues to expand his interdisciplinary language, offering audiences an intimate and poignant window into the shifting terrain of identity and the body. www.shahryarshahamat.com
Calla is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and the support of Vangeline Theater/New York Butoh Institute.