The Art of Butoh from Japan to Australia
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About Yumi
Born in Japan, Yumi is an established Butoh dancer, choreographer and creator of Butoh Cabaret works. After touring with the seminal Japanese Butoh company DaiRakudakan, Yumi moved to Melbourne in 1993. She has been creating her distinctive style of works for 30 years and her creations are renowned for provoking visceral emotions and engaging with cultural identities with a sense of humor. Yumi’s works have been seen in numerous festivals in dance, theatre and film productions throughout Australia, Japan, Europe, New Zealand, South East Asia and South America and have received several Australian Green Room awards. Her major production credits include DasSHOKU Butoh cabaret series (1999-), EnTrance (2009-2012) and PopUp Tearoom series (2015-) and her recent solo work Buried TeaBowl-OKUNI (2022-).
Photograph credits from the top:Garth Oriander(EnTrance), Albert Comper, John Pryke, Jeff Busby(DasSHOKU Hora!!)
Through her unique experience of living both in Japan and Australia, she has created a new genre, Butoh Cabaret, which explores cultural identities through narratives and abstraction. Her works have received critical acclaim and garnered her and her collaborators several Australian Green Room awards. Her own production’s credits include Fleeting Moments (1998), Tokyo DasSHOKU Girl (1999-2003), DasSHOKU Cultivations!! Osaka (2003), DasSHOKU Hora!! (Melbourne 2005 and Sydney Opera House 2006) and DasSHOKU SHAKE! (2012), which won Melbourne Fringe Festival Awards and Innovation in Green Room Awards.
As an independent artist, she has collaborated with various Australian leading companies from diverse cultures and genres such as Finucane and Smith, BighART, Marrugeku, Weave Movement Theatre, Back to Back Theatre and The Rabble. As a choreographer, Yumi has worked with many socially engaged theatre projects in Australia, including communities of First Nations, refugees and culturally diverse people and also inclusive companies. She is a recipient of the fellowship from Australian Council (2015-16) and a winner of the Green Room Geoffrey Milne Memorial Award (2017).
Yumi is a key figure of the international contemporary Butoh scene and artistic director of ButohOUT! festival in Melbourne since 2017, teaching and activating local and international Butoh communities. Through her innovative work with international collaborations, Yumi has challenged traditional notions of what Butoh is and how it can be performed, and has helped to broaden its scope both locally and abroad. Yumi's commitment to exploring new forms of expression and collaboration has kept Butoh relevant and exciting in the 21st century.
Yumi ‘s recent works focus on Dance, Tea and Spirit, combining through Jujutsu Project, the notion of Japanese shamanism.
“UMIUMARE GIVES OUR CITY AN EXTRAORDINARY, HILARIOUS AND ACTUALLY BEAUTIFUL GIFT.”
— THE AGE 2012
Excerpt of works by Yumi Umiumare
Awards
Major Work Highlights
MAJOR WORK HIGHLIGHTS
Yumi’s CV (summary)
Yumi’s CV (1990-2017)
Selected Reviews
Article Reviews
IN THE PRESS:
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By Andrew Eglinton
Cultural disorientation is dancer Yumi Umiumare's artistic drive
At a certain level, the act of resettling overseas unsettles the idea of home itself. It ruptures the narrative of belonging that we construct through attachments to people and places. Read more…
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By Suzanne Sandow
Intrinsic to White Day Dream is a whimsical set by Jennifer Tran made almost entirely of white plastic shopping bags, in fact the plastic bags extend to the auditorium. They are a marvelous canvas and make great props. Read more…
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By Des Barry
Ghosts in the Dry Bush: Discovering Butoh and the Art of Yumi Umiumare
My guide, S—, raises the brim of my straw hat, ties a tight cotton blindfold over my eyes. She takes my left hand. The air is brutally hot and still. Palm to palm, her skin is soft and cool, her delicate fingers lie across mine, the veins and small bones on the back of her hand beneath my thumb. Read more...
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Nicola Fearn: Yumi Umiumare with Theatre Gumbo, DasSHOKU SHAKE!
Shaken out of the everyday
If you want to be seized and dropped into a bizarre and cacophonous world of extreme entertainment then see DasShoku SHAKE!—a Japanese Australian butoh cabaret extravaganza. Inspired by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan this production is an exploration of the shaking of the physical world, the psychological self and culture. Read more…
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By Owen Richardson
Festival of Live Art review: Hidden worlds and pop-up tea rooms emerge in participatory festival
The Festival of Live Art leads its attendees out of the passive, asymmetrical role of art consumer into becoming a participant. One of the questions then raised is, where is the artist, exactly? The answer could be: everywhere. Read more…
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By Kaye Hall
Art shocks, capitalism quakes!
How do you explore mindless capitalism in the face of one of the world’s most horrific natural disasters? Take hyped Japanese businessmen, lascivious Geishas, balloon boobs, one very bent “good Japanese mummy” (and her dancing baby poo heads) and a woman “searching for the Light”, and throw them together in a mad kitsch crush of Butoh and Burlesque, heading for impending doom. Read more…
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Reviewed by Frank McKone
Under the spotlight: Yumi Umiumare
MiNDFOOD talks to Yumi Umiumare as she prepares for her solo performance "EnTrance" at 2009 Oz Asia Festival.
“This is my first time performing a full-length solo show where I incorporate all the elements of my art. There are short segments for each style and towards the end I perform a Butoh segment with my face painted white, so it is like I am returning to my roots.” Read more…
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YouTube: Finucane & Smith
The Burlesque Hour
“This was one of the best shows I have ever seen! Fantastic & so out there entertainment. Loved it a must see show. Go see with an open mind!” Watch video…
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By Jonathan Bollen: 2009 ozasia festival
The effect of Yumi Umiumare’s performance is difficult to describe. Its mode is enacted evocation, its energies exacting. Yet it also feels quite slippery and elusive. It passes through six phases: Maze, Cityscape, Cracked Mirror, Punk Medusa, Tears and Shiro Hebi (White Snake). It moves with a strong sense of progression, but without the certainty of departure or destination. Read more…
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By Georgina Boucher
Yumi Umiumare as ‘cross-cultural’ rebel in ‘DasSHOKU Hora!!’
Japanese-born performer Yumi Umiumare’s playful investigations of cross-cultural femininity strategically utilise in-between subjectivities to fracture cultured and gendered truths. In 1995 Umiumare devised a performance in Melbourne named Tokyo DasShoku girl. Read more…
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By John Bailey
The monstrous feminine, Japanese-style (DasSHOKU Hora!)
Butoh and cabaret would upon first glance appear to offer twin poles of performance: the former a mode of ritual and refusal, the latter of audience engagement and excess. In the performances of Yumi Umiumare, however, they are fused to produce a fascinating amalgam which draws its power from the dissonance of our expectations. Read more…
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By Jonathan Marshall: Melbourne Festival dance
Contaminating bodies, existential dances (In-Compatibility)
The thin membrane of skin separates one supposedly independent, free, voting individual from another. Yet when bodies bleed and ooze, when one body’s psycho-neural shaking is communicated beyond the family into society as a whole, we react with horror. Bodies are supposed to be cohesive and self-contained in all but the most intimate of contexts. Read more…
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By Keith Gallasch
Bodies at work (Innana’s Descent)
There’s something eerily right about being taken beneath a Masonic Centre (appropriately a bunker of a building in Sydney’s CBD concealing sanitised ancient male rituals) to see a performance about a Sumerian goddess of about 5,000 years ago whose various manifestations (Ishtar, Astarte, Isis etc) place her somewhere in the long transition from matriarchal to patriarchal cultures. Read more…
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By Jonathan Marshall: Mixed Metaphor 2001
The art of uneasy steps(How could you even begin to understand?)
Butoh’s founder Tatsumi Hijikata once reflected that a body that rests upon straight legs is a body equipped with reason, while that on bent legs lies at the edge of reasonable understanding (Jean Viala, Nourit Masson-Sekine, eds, Butoh: Shades of darkness, Tokyo, Shufunotomo, 1991). Mixed Metaphor 2001 abounded with dancers whose forms rose above the ground with an uneasy step. Read more…
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By Jonathan Marshall
Mixed Metaphor: selected breakages(INORI-in-visible)
“I like smashing things,” Margaret Trail confessed in K-ting!. It was a fortnight of ‘smashing’ in Melbourne, from Chunky Move’s exploding set floor in their Hydra (shades of John Carpenter’s The Thing) to Yumi Umiumare’s evocation of the Hanshin earthquake in her Mixed Metaphor piece INORI-in-visible. Artaud’s exclamation that “The sky has gone mad!” was repetitively rendered on stage. Read more…