Paul Ibey

Butoh, or dance of darkness, is one of the major developments in contemporary dance. It has revolutionized the way people view what dance is or can be. Originating in 1960s Japan, butoh has created new forms of movement and expression. Its powerful imagery takes its strength from interior movement: the body twists, contracts, extends. Softness, violence, slowness, sensuality and immobility are all part of butoh. The butoh dancer attempts to bare his inner soul to reveal both the suffering and joy of life. It is not the extent of my workshops to create newly trained butoh dancers: rather, through the physical and emotional techniques of butoh, the dancers may supplement their existing techniques, much in the same way as developing a wide vocabulary in order to express thoughts and concepts more freely.

Paul is an independent choreographer, performer and teacher. His work often represents a hybrid of styles, but his main focus is Butoh. He teaches butoh master-classes internationally, dividing his time between the UK, Europe, North America and the Mid-East.

"My training took place in Europe with a variety of teachers such as Lynn Seymour, Lindsay Kemp, Adam Darius, and focussed on butoh with Sankai Juku, Natsu Nakajima and Kazuo Ohno, amongst others. My creative mandate is to combine the line and physicality of dance with the dramatic and emotional motivation of theatre. In recent years, working with Northern Ballet Theatre and other compagnies, I have been teaching ballet with the butoh motivations, in order to push beyond the limitations of technique in order to find the interpretive motivation for "steps" and to give dancers insight into useing additional imagery for their work, to add shading and colour to choreography.

Since 1995, I have been teaching and performing in Europe: Paris, Hungary with Compagnie Yvette Bozsik and Trafo House of Contemporary Arts, Silesian Dance Theatre and Lublin International Dance Festival in Poland, Contemporary Dance Festival (Turkey), the Biennale of Contemporary Dance in Poland, and Trafo House of Contemporary Arts in Budapest,the Kaunas Festival of Contempary Dance, The Place in London, ODTU Contemporary Dance Festival in Turkey, Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance(Austria) etc."