Min Yoon

also performs as “Citizen Truth” the translation of their Korean name

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artist statement / an account of attempts

With butoh dance and conflict studies, Min makes intimate, surreal, and psychosomatic dance performances and experimental moments to create moments of heightened relational emotions, permission for depths, and the emergent new. Min explores difficult truths that are beyond language through researching and dancing with a multiplicity of perspectives, unintentional movements within stillness and impulsive improvisation, and archetypes still with the intentions of a turning and new senses of beauty. Their dance collages intense imagery and physicality, stillness, and ritual.  

Recent works switch between listening to their own body and the bodies of others. In dancing with violence, they researched the bodily memories of violence of another dancer to create an auditory theater piece that invites the listeners to move and lightly embody the experiences poetically. In solo dance works, they connect conflicts within the body to archetypes and collective experiences, such as the Joker archetype and feelings of remorse at the edge of revenge, and comfort women (forced prostitutes of the Japanese army) as an older archetype engaging with the #metoo movement. In their choreographic experiments, they question how bodies respond and move together in groups, how we may find instinctual ways to move together beyond how our bodies were trained.

In Germany, Min danced at Dock11, Hošek Contemporary Gallery, 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 and many underground community spaces as well as in churches and a temple devoted to Minerva in Italy.

Min’s performances and social art works have been funded by NATIONALES PERFORMANCE NETZ (npn) in Germany, Dachverband Tanz Deutschland, 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.

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bio / a chronological story and tribute to lineage

I started attempting to create meaning in a secular age by studying existential philosophy and conceptual art through the Rhetoric and Philosophy BA at U.C. Berkeley, then looked for ways to bring these philosophies alive in narrative theater and social games. I went on to discover the power of what is unspoken, yet felt through the body, in what felt like the deepest experience of connection with butoh dance - a style of revolutionary art form created in WWII era that expresses aesthetics of life and death. Since discovering butoh dance, I have been working to bring together different art forms in intimate, theatrical, and psycho-somatic experiences and artistic rituals.

I had the chance to intensively study, perform, and live in artistic residency with master butoh teachers Atsushi Takenouchi of Jinen Butoh School in Italy, Anastazia Louise of Bad Unkl Sista, and Mizu Desierto of Water in the Desert at their permabutoh farm, as well as continuous training in choreography and dance with master teachers in San Francisco and Berlin. I have also undergone the Life/Art Process and training as an ArtCorps scholar at the Tamalpa Institute by Anna and Daria Halprin and am a registered somatic movement educator and facilitator with ISMETA.

My artistic questioning and life found some turns when some conflict facilitators came to the “Origins of a Woman” show on the history of comfort women, and Gary Reiss, who works with world issues and spiritual studies, invited me to study conflict with butoh dance at the Process Work Institute with a scholarship. This was around the time George Floyd was murdered and the racial and social divides were louder and I needed to confront what is happening off the stage. I recently completed the MA in Process Oriented Psychology and Conflict Studies, and researched how the body communicates emotions that are less conscious to the intelligible parts of us.

My experiences also include experimenting with group rituals as part of an interfaith wellness center with my philosophy teacher, Tyler Krupp, and producing residencies and shows as part of the legendary CounterPulse theater in SF.

“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