Min works with the body as an uncertain territory, using post/Butoh, voice and improvisation to investigate what happens when the body interrupts its own patterns and enters expanded senses of being.

With impulsive improvisation and abstract emotionality, Min Yoon explores dance as a process and portal for holding questions of atrocity and the potential of being human, that feel larger than the finite and concrete.  They stay with the darkness until something becomes visible… Transcen-dance as a possibility after a long-duration of searching, desperation and endurance.

Their performances are intimate, surreal and psychophysical, moving between exposure of internally suppresed states, breath within disturbance, tenderness, intensity, and truth as a moving target. Yoon allows imaginary spaces to form the body, searching for states in which movement and voice can emerge before conscious intention. Emotional material that has been suppressed, accumulated or fermented across time is approached as sensation, image, rhythm and presence.

Fragments from responses to Yoon’s work:

“entrancing, moving, disturbing, strangely relieving”

“not for the attention-seeking economy”

“the heavy breathing of one body becoming the resistance of one nation”

“visually magnetic”

Their current solo work dancing-being-in-time depicts loops of movements, vocal tremors, and memories, with the body as an archive of pain, states, and transformation. In dancing with violence, they researched the bodily memories of violence of another dancer to create an auditory theater piece that invites listeners into poetic, sensory engagement with the material. In choreographic experiments, they question what are the images, imaginations, and group archetypes we need for our times with relational tension, polarities, and competing realities... how bodies respond and move together unintentionally in groups, and how we may find instinctual ways to move together beyond how our bodies were societally trained.

Min’s performances have been funded by NATIONALES PERFORMANCE NETZ (npn) in Germany, Dachverband Tanz Deutschland, MUSIKFONDS, Kultuuri Kaupilla in Finland, The City of Oakland, The Battery Club of San Francisco, and the Awesome Foundation, with other artist residencies and grants. Min has also been a fellow at Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (ZK/U Berlin) and an artcorps scholar at the Tamalpa Institute founded by Daria and Anna Halprin.

In Germany, Min danced at Dock11, Hošek Contemporary Gallery, Oyoun, ZK/U, Uferstudios, 90mil, Berghain, Tatwerk, Petersburg Arts Space, Trauma Bar und Kino (in residency), Kühlspot Social Club, p7 Gallery, Haus der Statistik, and 4fürtanz (leipzig). In the U.S. Min danced at CounterPulse (sf), Headwaters Theater (pdx), ProArts Gallery (sf), Highways Performance Space (la), Epic Immersive (sf).  Min also dances in the streets, nature, and many underground community spaces as well as in churches and a temple devoted to Minerva in Italy.

Min has been a part of international collaborations with artists Ari David, Nicola Bullock, Jessica Gaynor, Rodrigo Zorzanelli, ingo reulecke, hen/i, and musicians, Wieland Möller, Nick Dunston, Korhan Erel, Nicolas Wiese, Phillip Greenlief, Kevin Corcoran, Francis Heery, Edith Steyer, Samuel Hall, Germán Gabriel Garcia, Roman Stolyar, Klaus Janek, Tom Foskett-Barnes, CYANE, Crystal Quartez, and more.
Min has performed in the works of Atsushi Takenouchi (Italy), Joana Von Mayer Trindade (Portugal), Anastazia Louise Aranaga (USA), Mizu Desierto (USA), Estrellx Supernova (USA), Ariellah Aflalo (USA), Kudo Taketeru (Japan), Slava Inozemecev (Belarus), and pussy riot.



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the path here


Min Yoon’s artistic path began with a question of how to create meaning in a secular age. They studied Rhetoric and Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, with a focus on existential philosophy and conceptual art, while experimenting with ways of bringing philosophical questions into narrative theatre and social games.

Their encounter with Butoh shifted this inquiry from the conceptual into the body. In Butoh, Yoon encountered a language for what can be felt before it can be spoken—a way of approaching the paradoxes of life and death, presence and absence, beauty and disturbance through the body. Since then, they have been developing a practice that brings together post/Butoh dance, voice, theatre, improvisation and ritual in intimate, embodied experiences.

Their dance background is both institutional and internal, with studies at Atsushi Takenouchi’s Jinen Butoh School, Daria and Anna Halprin’s Tamalpa Institute, and researching embodied choreography in conflict studies at the Process Work Institute. They also danced with nature long-term as an artist at their teacher Mizu Desierto’s permaculture/butoh farm experiment connected to the Headwaters Theater. 

At a certain point, questions of what happens within the body could no longer be separated from questions of what happens between bodies. Their dance and life continue to be shaped by international perspectives and world-level atrocities.

“They say it’s the last song.
They don’t know us, you see.
It’s only the last song if we let it be.”
— Dancer in the Dark



+ photography by Anna Vignet