Butoh Performance 'Piercing Heart' | Joan Laage/Kogut Butoh (USA)

Piercing Heart
Created by Joan Laage/Kogut Butoh
Commissioned music by Bill Horist

So many thoughts and desires pierce our consciousness, our hearts, sometimes settling, other times escaping through the fleeting air. Where do we find our freedom and peace? In confinement or total abandonment? Piercing Heart was performed twice at Shimmer: Seattle Summer Butoh Festival, at the Chapel venue in Seattle in 2023, at an experimental music festival in Vienna with musicians Florian Feit and Christoph Punzmann the same year, and in Chicago at Asian Improv aRts Midwest brought by Butoh Curious Chi. Joan also performed this piece at Spazio NU in Italy and in Bruxelles in winter 2026. Piercing Heart is a beautifully haunting piece full of yearning, turbulence, and compassion to a complex and riveting musical score.