Sylwia Hanff

Sylwia Hanff (performer) & Alexandre Yterce (acousmatic music)
Post-butoh/body art & sound/ ritual performance

I walked on the edge of the Abyss. Through destruction I reached the belly and heart of the world and of life.

Stay in the fire. Enter this luminous active darkness. Stay in this black light. Surrender to this living Emptiness. The descent begins. Become this Depth.

Butoh dance was born in Japan in 1959 as a countercultural form of performing arts. It is a radical form of post-dance, surrealistic poetics and transmutations of the human body into myriad forms of existence. The European artistic and philosophical avant-garde also contributed to its emergence: the DADA movement, Surrealism, Expressionism, the writings of F. Nietzsche and G. Bataille, Mary Wigman’s ritual Ausdruckstanz. Butoh is also a spiritual practice linked to the ritualistic origins of theatre and dance, shamanism and animism. My butoh art is based on over 25 years of experience in the spiritual practices of Eastern and Western esoteric traditions. Butoh called ‘the dance of darkness’ is for me an encounter with the Divine Darkness beyond the mind, a passionate union with existence in which the ecstasy of love is mixed with the ecstasy of death.

“Alexandre Yterce’s music, with its shuddering, undulating sound, is seductive in its sensitivity, its exacerbated nervousness, offered up as if in a sacrificial hymn. Sound poetry, rhythms and breath mingle in a framework (similar to Antonin Artaud’s ‘cruelty’) extracted from life itself.”

Sylwia Hanff is a pioneer and the most recognisable butoh dancer in Poland, who studied butoh with the greatest masters. She has an M.A. in philosophy, with a theoretical background in Theatre Anthropology. She has studied many Western and Eastern, contemporary and ancient body techniques. Sylwia is a choreographer, director, cultural manager, labyrinth meditation facilitator and kundalini yoga teacher. She curates art and cultural education projects and is the founder and artistic director of Butohpolis – International Butoh Art Festival. On stage for 29 years, she has so far performed in more than 40 institutional and independent theatre productions. Since 2002 he has been running the Limen Butoh Theatre, exploring butoh as a ritual art inspired by Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty or J. Grotowski’s Theatre of Sources, Objective Drama and Art as Vehicle. She has created 30 solo and group performances.

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