Café Reason Butoh Dance Theatre present TIPPING POINT: Our World in Crisis, Al Jaber Auditorium Corpus Christi College, 11th & 12th January 2020

With the clock ticking for the world to take action on climate change, Café Reason’s timely and provocative new work offers a creative response to the threats facing our fragile planet. Eloquent dance and eclectic live music express the vulnerability of the earth and our own responsibility for it, past and future.  Tipping Point: Our World in Crisis weaves together surreal physical theatre, vocal improvisation, original video, bizarre costume, and found objects, to shine a slantwise, shifting light on our complex and evolving relationship with the Earth. At once beautiful and disturbing, it presents an absorbing, challenging, and moving audience experience.

Café Reason is an Oxford based experimental performance company specialising in butoh – a radical dance form that originated in post-war Japan. Its work has aways enjoyed a synergy with other disciplines, combining dance with original music, poetry and other texts, installation art, and video. Constantly innovating, the group seeks to extend the boundaries of perception and the interpretation of what it means to be human.

Performances:  Saturday 11th & Sunday 12th January, 7.30pm

Venue:  Al Jaber Auditorium, Corpus Christi College, Merton Street, Oxford, OX1 4JF 

Tickets: £12 book through Eventbrite

Find out more about Café Reason performances and classes here

 

The World Stage: Dance and Music with Marhaba at Cowley Carnival 1st July 2018

Based in East Oxford Marhaba is a popular and well established collaboration between various Oxford groups providing a platform for sharing music and dance between diverse communities – making the international local.  As part of the Discovery Zone of this year’s Cowley Carnival and curated by Confluence Collective, Marhaba will be hosting The World Stage at the Church of St Mary and St John with an international range of music and dance provided by locally based artists, guests and enthusiasts, to listen to, watch and join in… see below for the schedule.

This rich and welcoming event will throughout the day also include film shows of the work of Oxford dance artist Ana Barbour (1966 – 2017) to whose memory the event is dedicated, as well as poetry and music.

Key performance times are:

12.00 Film and ad hoc performance
1.25 Mue
1.40 Shakhosi
2.00 Dabke dance workshop by visiting Ramallah group
2.30 Café Reason Butoh Dance Theatre
2.45 Rumi for one more – interpretations and reflections on the work f Rumi
3.45 Pencak Silat Indonesian dance and music
4.00 The Littlemore Oratorio (abridged version)

When:  Sunday 1st July, 12.00-5.15pm

Venue:  Church of St Mary & St John, 1 Leopold Street (off Cowley Road), Oxford OX4 1PS

All welcome, no charge

Find out about this event here

Find out more about Marhaba here

Find out more about Ana Barbour and her work here

Further information about Confluence Collective here

 

 

Cafe Reason present Limina, exhibition and performance, Freud Café-bar 3rd-11th December 2017

liminal /ˈlɪmɪn(ə)l/ (adj.)
Relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process.
Occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold

At the winter solstice, as the earth tilts fractionally once more towards the sun, in the glimmering pre-dawn stillness, at the moment before waking when the dream dissolves, or just before sleep as the moorings of consciousness are let slip, or as the last breath leaves the body and the soul drifts away, or at the point when the old order is left behind and the new is all ahead – these liminal states and the possibilities they suggest are explored in Café Reason Butoh Dance Theatre‘s new, part-improvised show Limina.

With this theme of beginnings and endings, transition, and duality, the company looks back to its past and forward to its future, with a ‘cabaret-style’ performance that offers an eclectic mix of reimagined early work and fresh choreography from newer members – a dreamlike series of short butoh-inspired pieces, combined with live music and video. Long-term collaborators Malcolm Atkins, Bruno Guastalla, and Pete McPhail will provide an exciting and original musical interpretation.

 

Café Reason in The Heart’s Desire at The Old Fire Station 13th-14th June 2014

Café Reason Butoh Dance Theatre and voice artist Anne L Ryan join forces to create a highly original and eccentric piece of physical theatre, combining butoh dance with an extraordinary vocal landscape, for forthcoming performances at the Old Fire Station.  A woman is searching for meaning and balance in her life, moving between the sensory, material world of the Lion and the spiritual realm of the Unicorn to find her one, true desire.  Inspired by the intriguing medieval tapestries The Lady and The Unicorn, The Heart’s Desire uses both voice and movement to present a quirky and playful exploration of our five senses – taste, touch, smell, hearing, and sight – and their rôle in our lives.

 

Café Reason Diamond Night 13 at Oxford Brookes Drama Studio 19th April 2014

Café Reason returns this weekend with the 13th in their series of informal platform performances Diamond Nights.  At this Diamond Night, as the company will be trying out material for their upcoming new production The Heart’s Desire – created in collaboration with voice artist Anne L. Ryan – some of the evening will take the form of an open rehearsal. It will be a chance to see part of this work-in-progress and for audience to give some feedback to help the group develop the piece before its full performance at The Old Fire Station on June 13 and 14.  The occasion is also still open for artists who may have work they would like to present and share.

 

Improvised music for improvised dance – Malcolm Atkins reflects

Experienced improviser and composer Malcolm Atkins shares his recent practice working with dancers, and raises intriguing questions about the relationship between dance and music…

Improvised music for improvised dance

As part of my practice of accompanying dance I regularly improvise for Café Reason Butoh Dance Theatre Classes. These improvisations which are solo responses to exercises and pieces developed in class, have evolved over the years I have been doing this. I was asked to record some by the class organisers and have started doing this and making them available as free downloads on a bandcamp site I set up in my name.

I have made them freely available so that anyone attending the class can develop their ideas between classes by being reminded of what they were working on but also to demonstrate that spontaneous musical improvisation in support of dance can create a very particular musical atmosphere which is often determined by the style of dance and the way the dancer stimulates and responds to a dynamically created musical accompaniment.