Dance: Ioku Ero Nikaido
Sound: Xu Cheng

Commissioned by Shanghai Ming Contemporary Art Museum in 2018, “(Im)Possibly a Square Dance Butoh Performance" was premiered as part of the "57th Venice Biennale China Pavilion (Mainland China Tour Exhibition - Shanghai)", invited to reshow in Paris by the “Association Culturelle Franco-Japonaise de TENRI” in the same year, and international dance festival “2026 Dance Now Asia”  this October in Taiwan.

This is absolutely not a Butoh performance;
It's a question, a process, but it offers no answers.
What is Butoh?
This is a question every Butoh artist must confront,
and Ero hopes that after watching this performance,
the audience will also begin to think about this question.

Born in 1991, Ero a.k.a “Ioku Ero Nikaido” is an independent butoh and performance artist base in Hong Kong.

Since 2011, Ero has travelled the world to learn from more than 40 Butoh artists, among them, Ero has been influenced by Butoh master Yumiko Yoshioka the most.

In 2014, Ero co-founded the art group “Normaphobia” with Kiwi Chan in Hong Kong, and act as the co-artistic director until 2016. During the period Ero choreographed the first butoh solo “FA(iry)TALE”. The piece was performed twice in Hong Kong, invited to perform in Shanghai Ming Contemporary Art Museum in 2016, and on Costa Cruise by PFLAG China in 2019 for their National LGBT Conference.

“I AM (not) A BUTOH ARTIST”, debuted in 2015, was the first work experimenting on the aesthetics and philosophy of the concept “transformation” in Butoh. As an extension of this experiment, in 2018, Ero debuted “(Im)Possibly a Square Dance Butoh Performance”. In 2024, Ero started to choreograph "(Im)Possibly an Odottemita Dance Butoh Performance" to continue his exploration.

In 2024, Ero was invited by Japanese sound artist Hiroko KOMIYA to be a cast member in the Asia tour of her audio-visual Butoh performance "Frequency in Motion". In 2025, Ero was invited by acclaimed Butoh choreographer Seisaku and Yuri Nagaoka to be a cast in the China tour of their work "Invisible Forest".X

Xu Cheng is a Shanghai-based sound artist and researcher active since the early 2000s. His practice spans noise, experimental music, free improvisation, field recording, and electronic music. He explores sound’s perceptual, medial, and social dimensions—how sound shapes space, social relations, and knowledge. He is especially interested in text as a sonic field, examining the sonic qualities of language, writing, and reading, and sound’s migration, translation, and reproduction across media.