A bodily journey into the invisible, where Butoh meets the Andean cosmovision. Through deep movement and connection with the elements of nature, we will explore the body as a sensitive and ritual territory. An invitation to inhabit dance as a rite of transformation, memory, and return to the essential.

This workshop offers a space for deep exploration where Butoh dance intertwines with the Andean cosmovision. Through exercises of perception, stillness, and movement, participants are invited to listen to the body as a sensitive territory in constant dialogue with nature and its forces. The Andean worldview reminds us that everything that exists —human, animal, mineral, vegetal, cosmic— is woven into the same web of relationships. From this perspective, the body becomes ritual: an act of offering, reciprocity, and openness to the invisible.

Movement emerges from the connection with the elements  and with the ancestral memory that inhabits every gesture, beyond form and aesthetics. Butoh, with its search for the essential and its ability to move between life and death, fragility and strength, offers an ideal language to enter this territory. The workshop is thus a path of transformation: a dance that is not performed but that happens; a space to recognize the archaic and the contemporary that coexist within the body, allowing an authentic expression to emerge —one that connects the personal with the collective, the intimate with the universal.

 

Andrea Casallas is the founder of “Yakwa Dance,” a dancer and ethnopedagogue from Colombia.
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She has been living in Switzerland since 2007. Since 2005, she has been intensively involved in Butoh dance and has trained with renowned teachers such as Yumiko Yoshioka, Tadashi Endo, Atsushi Takenoushi, Susana Reyes, Susanne Daeppen, and Minako Seki.
Andrea has found in Butoh dance the perfect channel to develop an authentic and radical dance form that offers her an infinite palette for creative expression that transcends material form. In her pieces and performances, Andrea explores themes such as birth and death, femininity, visible and invisible structures, fragility and strength, archaism and modernity, always based on deep physical, sensory, emotional, and philosophical research that supports these themes and translates them into a unique and personal dance language.
Andrea has received the Off-Stage Scholarship 2016, Förderazekt 2021, and CicaS scholarships from the Canton of Bern, Switzerland. These scholarships have enabled her to conduct research in the field of Butoh dance and ethnic dances in South America.
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