Saturday, August 29, 2026, 7:00 pm - 8:15 pm

Performance: “100 Light Years of Solitude”

Following Yumiko’s solo Before the Dawn, this is the second part of her trilogy “100 Flowers” Inspired by Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude to explore a state of solitude Yumiko dances the life of a unique creature, born on a planet 100 light years away from ours. Imagining that this creature is the only one of its species on that planet, it enjoys unfolding its life until it realizes its destiny: to exist in solitude.

Yumiko Yoshioka is a Japanese Butoh dancer and choreographer based in Berlin and Japan. Yumiko is a former member of Ariadone, the first female Butoh company, which was founded by Ko Murobushi and Carlotta Ikeda in 1973. In 1989 she started to develop and teach her own form of bodywork. The approach became a pillar of her career as a reflection of her profound understanding of the importance of deepening consciousness of the body, not only in order to dance and express, but also to illuminate our daily life, opening ourselves to the deeper layers of our inner world and rediscovering a subtle beauty in each moment. The strength of this perception led her to create her own method of bodywork, called “Body Resonance”

In 1988, Yumiko founded THEATRE DANCE GROTESQUE with fellow Butoh artist Minako Seki and delta RA’i in Berlin (1988-1996). Between 1995-2015 she was a core member of TEN PEN CHii art labor, an interdisciplinary and experimental art formation, as a dancer and a choreographer along with JoaXhim Manger (visual artist) and Zam Johnson (composer and musician). Yumiko is also the key founder of the storied eX..it! Dance eXchange Festival at Schloss Bröllin. Many decade-long collaborations with interdisciplinary artists encouraged Yumiko to unfold her own personal style of dancing called “Body Resonance.”

Yumiko continues to be a key figure of the global Butoh scene and she has served as the Artistic Director of the B.I.G. (Butoh International Gathering) convergence, teaching and activating local and international Butoh communities. A chapter highlighting Yumiko’s career is featured in Bruce Baird’s newest book A HISTORY OF BUTŌ in which he writes that “Yumiko is an important proponent of mixed media butô through her dance company TEN PEN CHIi, and one of the dancers who has most embodied what it means to practice butô as an itinerant woman. Yoshioka keeps up a gruelling schedule of international travel teaching butô workshops around the world and also organized the eX..it! butô festival, bringing butô and dancers of other styles of dance in contact with each other…Whether by artists traveling to her, or as is much more often the case, Yoshioka traveling to artists, she has provided numberless dancers and artists with chances to ‘ex- change, ex- perience, ex- plore, and ex- it’ out of themselves and be changed in the process.”