Salish Sea Butoh Festival @ Fort Worden Historical Park

This August, the shores of the Olympic Peninsula will play host to an art form that feels somehow both ancient and experimental. Now in its fifth year, the Salish Sea Butoh Festival returns to Fort Worden State Park, bringing the surreal, slow-burning intensity of Butoh to a setting framed by sea, sky and historic architecture.

Butoh emerged in late-1950s Japan, influenced by Surrealism, Neo-Dada, German Expressionism, Japanese theater and East Asian spiritual thought. Created by Tatsumi Hijikata and his collaborators, it rejects aesthetic perfection in favor of exploring the idea of the primordial human being — often through themes of dreams, ghosts and the cycles of life and death. Cofounded in 2021 by choreographer and scholarIván-Daniel Espinosa and interdisciplinary performance artistCosmo Rapaport, the Salish Sea Butoh Festival has quickly grown into one of the largest active Butoh festivals in the United States — a rare honor for an art form still largely underground.

This year’s artist roster is as remarkable as the setting: Saga Kobayashi, one of the last living members of Hijikata’s original company; Joan Laage, widely regarded as the Godmother of Pacific Northwest Butoh; and the enthralling Mexico City-based dancer and choreographer Eugenia Vargas, among many others. Together they’ll transform Fort Worden’s USO Hall into a space where the line between body and spirit blurs.

Workshops are sold out, but there’s still plenty of room for the main stage performances on August 22 and 23, as well as a Sunday performance at an undisclosed forest location. Expect an evening that’s part ritual, part dream and entirely unrepeatable.