dancing-being-in-time

post/butoh dance + vocals by Min Yoon tr. “Citizen Truth” @dancetotheedge

performed at Links Hall, Chicago 2025
90mil Festival, Berlin 2025
Tanzmit Festival, Berlin 2024

[full documentation available on request]

dancing-being-in-time is a post/butoh performance of movement and voice by Min Yoon—a ritual of endurance, dismantling, and re-shaping pain patterns post-brutality.

“Not for the attention-seeking economy”, a slow evolution over the span of years is compressed into this single hour. It enters the body as a living archive of pain: How is pain danced in the same body that’s been strengthened, calloused by holding the pain relentlessly across years, across lifetimes?

Min Yoon creates live emotional sculptures across body and sound in space, loops of experimental durations for the audience to feel & process. The sounds are at times an end-result of physical impulses, looped and processed. Sounds enter the loop back into the body searching for new patterns. The voice and the body chase the origins of the present. The time fractures distort the inner worlds of memory and what happened.

Where the body is trapped, the voice presses through.
When we can’t go anywhere else
when we can’t escape external compression
go within. beyond. fantasies of pain travel ((())) time travel.

Body as an archive. as a passage. of pain.

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This dance research and performance is supported by DIS-TANZ SOLO Funding – Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media in the NEUSTART KULTUR program of the Dachverband Tanz Deutschland, Germany.

The Chicago performance is generously held and supported by Butoh Curious Chicago & Sara "Sharkey" Zalek
/ with tech + lights by Giau Trong / filmed by JI YAng & Helen Lee

“As pure aesthetic experience it was so visually magnetic, with sound and movement giving rise to each other. On one hand, there seems to be a kernel of persistence with each loop, an immovable principle dictating a history, a trajectory. On the other, every instance of "rewind" brought with it a rupture, a glitch to the algorithmic iteration. This was witnessed by your approaching the audience, the sand clock threatening us with exhausting itself, the sound-music becoming more and more dislocated. Speaking of sound, I so enjoyed the way you designed it. It was a constant reminder of the exertion you put yourself through, the physicality. And it was a tricky rhythmic trap, because it kept breaking it's own symmetry, the skin clashing with the panting clashing with vocalization clashing with movement.

The process of intensive repetition made me think of … wars and oppressive systems. As these systems endeavor to perpetuate themselves, there is always a virus of rebellion that sneaks into history, the heavy breathing of one body becoming the resistance of one nation. In the same way you fought fatigue over and over while sustaining the structure of repetition, I wonder if there is a singularity point in history, where it can't contain its own repetition anymore and collapses, or breaks away.”

- Words from Mover Efrén Cruz