17.10. Butoh Dance and Andean Cosmovision by Andrea Casallas

Workshop: Butoh Dance and Andean Cosmovision

Facilitator: Andrea Casallas

Date: Saturday 17th October

Time: 10:00 am – 12:00 pm

This workshop offers a space for deep exploration where Butoh dance intertwines with the Andean cosmovision. Through exercises of perception, stillness, and movement, participants are invited to listen to the body as a sensitive territory in constant dialogue with nature and its forces. The Andean worldview reminds us that everything that exists —human, animal, mineral, vegetal, cosmic— is woven into the same web of relationships. From this perspective, the body becomes ritual: an act of offering, reciprocity, and openness to the invisible. Movement emerges from the connection with the elements —earth, water, air, and fire— and with the ancestral memory that inhabits every gesture, beyond form and aesthetics.

Butoh, with its search for the essential and its ability to move between life and death, fragility and strength, offers an ideal language to enter this territory. The workshop is thus a path of transformation: a dance that is not performed but that happens; a space to recognize the archaic and the contemporary that coexist within the body, allowing an authentic expression to emerge —one that connects the personal with the collective, the intimate with the universal.

Andrea Casallas is a Colombian-Swiss Butoh dancer, performer and ethnopedagogue based in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland. She is the founder of Yakwa Dance. Since 2005, she has devoted herself intensively to Butoh, developing a distinctive artistic language at the intersection of body, transformation, memory, nature, identity and cultural roots.

Her long-standing Butoh practice has been shaped by encounters and training with internationally recognised artists and teachers including Susana Reyes, Susanne Daeppen, Yumiko Yoshioka, Tadashi Endo, Atsushi Takenouchi and Minako Seki. Rather than approaching Butoh as a fixed dance technique, she understands it as an open space for research, where the body, inner imagery, perception, and personal and collective memory enter into dialogue.

BE(A)WARE BUTOH FESTIVAL 2026