Min Yoon | dancetotheedge 


WHAT IS ELEMENTAL


at Biała CHATA 34-146 Stryszów 189, Poland (outside of Kraków)
Facebook event

post/butoh dance workshop with live music
with nature improvisations and ritual performance



photo by palo y piedra




SCHEDULE:

DATE:
SEPTEMBER 2025
5(Friday) -7(Sunday)

LOCATION: Biała Chata - POLANDPROGRAM:
OPENING PERFORMANCE
>>> FRIDAY / 7pm
WORKSHOP
>>>SATURDAY / 10am - 6pm
>>>SUNDAY / 10am - 5pm

Limited spots for 12 movers
To Register: Registration open here
Contact: Biała Chata - +48602128127 bialachata.kontakt@gmail.com

Movement & Sound WORKSHOP in NATURE.
WHAT IS ELEMENTAL.With Min Yoon (KR/USA) and Wieland Möller (DE)
Butoh Dance and Somatic Expressive Arts | Music Improvisation | Transformation | Nature

In the silent, stills of nature,
who am I now, who am I here,
standing bare in the space?
In this weekend, listen to your body / whole being
once again
through a journey into the nature of yourSelf
and from the core part that wants
to move with, relate, and be with escape, surrender, and integration
in the attempts to be in the natural / modern worlds.

Fire. Water. Earth. Air. Space.

The five elements — present in all of nature, including the nature of us — are alive in our bodies, emotions, and relationships. They shape how we connect to ourselves, to each other, and to the world around us. In many cultures, these elements form the foundation of both healing and artistic practices. They can bring us into more parts of ourselves that are becoming, into All.We dance imaginative, inspired, expansive, nuanced, surreal, and new senses in our body and the group body with nature metaphors, and to dance and reflect with the cycles of life, with our personal memories and the public media that remind us of grief and beauty in a temporary community space of the workshop. We look for new mixes, release, pleasurable confrontations, and processes.

This workshop explores the transformative power of the elements through movement and sound. In the two days, we will start with relaxing, releasing, and activating movements, building into dances that are physical and internal inspired by the imagination of nature, and methods of butoh dance, process work, somatic expressive arts. We will dance indoors and outdoors in the beautiful nature spaces, to live music of percussions, gong, and electronics by Wieland Möller.

Min and Wieland weave together tools from butoh dance, somatic therapy, process work (dream body, relationships, and resolving tension), and sound-based improvisation. Their collaboration creates a space for personal and collective inquiry — where the elements become metaphors for artistic exploration and emotional transformation. The movement scores will be inspired by long form evolution, repetition, and changes in the body from Min’s dance research, as well as fusing with JINEN butoh nature practices of butoh master, Atsushi Takenouchi that bring together the personal and universal senses of nature.

Arrive with a specific element you'd like to start to work with — for example, one you feel disconnected from or overwhelmed by. Through the body and voice, we’ll give it shape, rhythm, and expression, allowing it to shift and integrate.

What to Expect:
Movement sessions inspired by butoh and nature-based practices - from ancient and contemporary
Musical explorations to awaken inner landscapes
Elemental somatic work: exploring how earth, water, fire, air, and space live within us
Guided improvisation and intuitive expression
Solo, partner, and group exercises
Integration in dialogue with the natural surroundings of Biała Chata

This is a space for all bodies — movers, musicians, curious beings — with or without prior experience. Bring comfortable clothes, water, and optionally a musical instrument.

Date: 5-7 September 2025

Location: Biała Chata, 34-146 Stryszów 189, Poland, www.bialachata.pl
(40 km south from Balice Cracow Airport)

Languages: English with some Polish translation as needed

Costs:
>>> 12 h workshops + 2x lunch + 2x dinner (maximum 12 participants)
- 225 euro / 950 pln (early birds before 1.08)
- 275 euro / 1150 pln (before 1.09)
- 325 euro / 1350 pln (before 4.09)>>> 1 night accommodation + breakfast
- 25 euro / 100 pln (maximum 10 sleeping places in 5 beds rooms in Biała Chata)>>> Opening Performance Ticket
- 15 euro / 60 pln (free for workshops participants)



more background:

Movers from previous workshops shared that this workshop shared poetic and imaginative ways of moving with nature metaphors,  that can be expansive, deep, and fun. They can feel the older practices for dance and meditation being evolved to integrate our contemporary lives of info, public media, and closeness and farness of what happens around the world~~~ for example, in being curious about our relationships to phones and dancing what is realistic, unrealistic, hyperexaggerated, theatrical, and subtle in our lives when we are alone, online, and together.  Movers also found it compelling to dig and research into their own patterns and cycles, and find the different ingredients that would allow them to compost.  In the workshop, nonverbal ways of communicating can allow for subconscious and emotions and ways of relating to emerge and bodies could feel, explore, and research in the temporary community.

Butoh dance started as a way of processing all the deaths after WWII. As my teacher shares, we dance to dance with the nature that makes us, All. Compost Mix Remix, is a new remix of ancient, natural, and the now with the paradoxes of being with the possibilities of expansion with connections to nature and the depths and layers and new emerging with emotions, beauty, atrocities, personal, world, relational, and imagined new fields. This workshop experience is a love letter for living and moving with the process, mystery, experimenting with old and evolving values between the earthy gutteral, and expansive sky, with our social realities, inner worlds and imagination, ...


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reflections and questions to be danced ~

with nature and new nature within us
~ Where are the connections and disconnections between relating to Nature, and the modern nature of our city lives? What happens when you embody an element of nature in contrast to modern, mechanical, or urban metaphors?
~ What do we feel,sense,learn from embodied metaphors of nature ecology and pathways?
~ What strengths and characteristics can we dance, embody, and live from nature spots?
~ Butoh dance uses imagery of nature layered with other images to create new feelings and experiences. How do we integrate socio-political questions that are important today, with the body, and explore to know something new?
~ What applies and doesn’t apply to the heady atmosphere we have to live with? Can we think of our mental landscapes as nature as well?
~ In movement, how do we balance the desire to escape into nature with the overwhelming pace of city life? How does the body respond to these competing impulses?
~ For example, metaphors of decay, typhoons, water, and the mother are deep parts of my dreaming body in life, art, and psychology, in how I process and show up in personal and world-level conflicts. 

internally
~ When are we dancing and creating art for pleasure and escape, versus looking for strength and new possibilities for resilience and endurance?
~ How does our inner nature evolve in cycles?
~ What are our organic reactions and possible responses to surprises or processes that get in the way?
~ What makes old archetypes, ours / mine? What queers, subverts, and makes relevant ancient archetypes?
~ How do we notice mental information conflicting with our embodied feelings in movement? What happens when we process and combine the separate experiences and senses?
~ How does your body carry the weights of the collective struggles and yours ~ over time?

relationally
~ How do our inner natures dance in relation?
~ This experience is important as it creates an embodied practice of long-term values like patience, resilience, and the experiences that go beyond words, as well as experimenting moving together in a temporary community.
~ From disruption and tension, how do new layers and metaphors add to feelings of shifts, changes, and transformations?
~ When all is falling in chaos and disruption. How do we navigate relational webs? What role does connection play in times of instability? 


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Dancer Min Yoon and Musician Wieland Möller fuse together butoh dance, sound, psychosomatic therapy, conflict studies (process work) and artistic practice with nature and awareness.

The movement scores will be inspired by long form evolution, repetition, and changes in the body from Min’s dance research, as well as fusing with JINEN butoh nature practices of butoh master, Atsushi Takenouchi that bring together the personal and universal senses of nature.

*** note

With an intentional and strong container for depth, beauty, and multi-sensory awareness, this will be a place for artistic processing, and not necessarily therapy although no doubt art can be therapeutic. We will encourage community support and Min will be open to talk during some of the breaks.

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WORDS ABOUT MIN’S HOLDING SPACE:

“I was surprised, touched, and carried through this experience, within the gentle, fluid container that Min created for us. I found new parts of myself and reconnected with old ones, stripping away the facade of who I wanted others to see and revealing the parts of me that have always tried to hide. I will forever remember this experience, which has opened doors for me as to what movement can look like and be.” - Jen

“Min facilitated sessions which included written reflections, storytelling, expressive movement, movement based in imagery and imagination, interview-type conversations, and drawing. The range of activities meant that an idea seeded in one area could move to another, and another, and eventually become something very different in form, yet connected in concept, to the initial inspiration. This experience, guided and supported by Min, invited (but never forced) me into the depths of memory and psyche, alternative movement pathways, and new perspectives. I experienced emotional opening and relief as a result of working with Min and a shift in how I related to old stories about my life and my body. The research felt important to my healing process and also empowered me to show up differently– more aware, present, and understanding– in my relationships. While no two sessions were alike, I always felt held in the patient and loving container that Min created.” - Nicola


+from recent workshop, photos by Nanda D’Agostino 



ARTISTS BIO

Min Yoon tr. Citizen Truth | dancetotheedge.com + instagram.com/dancetotheedge

With butoh dance, vocals, and conflict studies, Min makes intimate, surreal, and psychosomatic performances and experiences of heightened relational emotions, permission for depths, and the emergent new. Min dances difficult truths beyond language through plurality of perspectives, unintentional movements within stillness and impulsive improvisation, and archetypes. Their dance collages intense imagery and physicality, stillness, and ritual.

Min has been mixing butoh dance, conflict studies, and somatic therapy to bring workshops to communities in Berlin, Vienna, Basel, Ii, SF, Portland, LA, and more cities as well as off the map places. Min teaches workshops as well as creates experimental community performances in artistic institutions and community spaces.

Recent works switch between listening to their own body and the bodies of others. 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 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, Oyoun, ZK/U, 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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Min and Wieland met at X...it! international butoh festival 5 years ago and have since collaborated on sound and movement projects that process deep emotions and topics such as the embodied memories of east/west Germany, dancing with violence, military sex violence, and group body research in crises, as well as improvisations with “pure” sound and movement. 


Wieland Möller | wielandmoeller.com

Wieland Möller is an experienced performer based in Berlin with movement and sound for over 20 years in the fields of jazz, improvised music, and contemporary dance. He recently completed a new Masters degree at the Musikhochschule Dresden on the connection of sound and movement, especially on the physicality of playing an instrument into extended movements and performative qualities. His recent solo performance work brings this research together with the topic of perception and awareness of different spaces. He is fascinated by making sounds visual and motions audible.

He studied at the Rotterdams Conservatory, Rhythmic Conservatory Copenhagen and Berklee College of Music and in New York. He has been a scholar of the Berklee College of Music, Goethe Institution Germany, and GVL. Wieland is the founder of the Akvariet Trio. He has performed at the Buenos Aires Jazz Festival, Jazz International Rotterdam Festival and among others, and has toured Germany, The Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Argentina and Iceland.

Being a performing musician and composer, Wieland Möller has been involved in dance and theater projects and performances, among others at the Biennale Berlin 2018, Junge Deutsche Oper Berlin, Gripstheatre, Reykjavik Dance Festival and Prague Dance Festival. He has worked with Kazuhisa Uchihashi, Markus Stockhausen, Klaas Hekman, Tobias Delius, Julyen Hamilton, Ingo Reulecke, Okwui Okpokwasili and other collaborators.


image of pine cone that only flowers, after a fire, by mrg


with big love to Min's inspirations and lineages~

JINEN Butoh by Atsushi Takenouchi
http://www.jinen-butoh.com/

Process-oriented psychology & conflict studies:
https://www.processwork.edu/what-is-processwork/

Life/Art Process by Anna Halprin and Daria Halprin:
https://www.tamalpa.org/about-us/our-process

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images with deep movers from past workshop experiences


photography by Palo y Piedra