In 1980 Mitsuyo Uesugi danced at The Place in London on Kazuo Ohno’s European tour. Ohno was one of the key founders of butoh. On Friday 13 November, now 76, Uesugi returns to The Place for the first time in 46 years with a new solo called A Requiem for Her.
Her return anchors Rebellious Bodies 2026, a festival set up in 2023 to bring established Japanese butoh dancers to UK audiences. This year’s programme runs from mid October to mid November, with screenings of the films Ohno made with director Chiaki Nagano leading up to two nights of live performance at The Place.
Kazuo Ohno's students, and their students, carrying his dance onto a London stage.
Butoh, the post-war Japanese dance of Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno
Butoh is an avant-garde form of performance that grew out of post-war Japan, led by Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno. The festival dates the first butoh performance to 1959, when Hijikata premiered Kinjiki (Forbidden Colours). It began as a deliberate break from imported Western dance such as ballet, and a search for movement that belonged to the Japanese body.
Butoh is famously hard to pin down. Common threads include slow movement and white body paint, and the imagery often goes to grotesque or taboo places. If the name is new to you, the programme notes for the festival’s Bangor event offer a recent reference point: the slow, contorted physicality Jacob Elordi brought to the Creature in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025).
Mitsuyo Uesugi and the dancers trained in Kazuo Ohno’s studio
Every dancer on the bill at The Place learned butoh from Kazuo Ohno, from his son Yoshito Ohno, or from Uesugi herself. The festival publishes fuller biographies on its 2026 artists page.
Mitsuyo Uesugi
Born in Fukuoka in 1950, Uesugi trained in classical ballet and moved to Tokyo in 1967. At twenty she became a student of Kazuo Ohno. She went on to become one of the first women to perform butoh as a soloist, and has now been performing for five decades. Her recent work includes Melancholia – A Portrait of M, a film and dance piece made with Makiko Takamatsu in 2021 and performed in the UK in 2023.
Makiko Takamatsu
Takamatsu studied film at Tama Art University and, while still a student, danced at Shogun, the show club run by Tatsumi Hijikata. She has studied under Uesugi since 2002. In 2025 the Dance Critics Society of Japan gave her its New Artist Award for her solo Idleness, and she also performs with WCN, an improvised music collective in Yokohama.
Seiji Tanaka
Tanaka learned from Yoshito Ohno at the Kazuo Ohno Dance Studio. He has since toured performances and workshops around Europe, with repeat visits to Germany, Belgium and Switzerland. His piece at The Place is his UK debut, and more about his work is on his official website.
MUTSUMINEIRO
Mutsumi and Neiro met at the Kazuo Ohno Dance Studio, also under Yoshito Ohno, and have worked as a duo ever since. They now live in Norway and tour internationally. Their piece Tonight or Never… was their UK debut in 2025, and their official website has more on the pair.
An Evening of Butoh Performance and Mother Forest at The Place
Friday 13 November: An Evening of Butoh Performance
The first night is a programme of four pieces of about 20 minutes each. MUTSUMINEIRO open with The Last Two, a new duet. Seiji Tanaka follows with Pulse of Absence. Makiko Takamatsu’s Naked Rabbit is a darkly playful solo based on the myth of the white hare of Inaba, and the evening ends with Uesugi’s A Requiem for Her, a dance for the generations of women she carries in her own body. An Evening of Butoh Performance starts at 7.30pm and runs 80 minutes plus an interval.
Saturday 14 November: Mother Forest『母なる森へ』
Mother Forest is a new ensemble piece that brings all five dancers together. The festival describes it as the first time three generations of butoh lineage have shared a UK stage. The work is an homage to Kazuo Ohno and to his view of dance as something spontaneous that can never be repeated. Uesugi traces it back to a rehearsal half a century ago in Ohno’s studio in Kamihoshikawa, when he opened a book of Bosch paintings, traced The Garden of Earthly Delights with his fingers and said: “This is the kind of dance I want to do.” It starts at 7.30pm and runs 60 minutes.
Friday for Uesugi’s solo, Saturday for the full ensemble
Go on Friday for Uesugi’s solo and for the chance to see each artist’s own style side by side. Go on Saturday to see all five dancers in one piece, the only time that happens in London. Both nights cost £22, or £18 for concessions, and The Place offers a discount when you book the two together. Both are recommended for ages 12 and over. Each performance contains partial nudity.
Kazuo Ohno’s three films with Chiaki Nagano, screened in London
Ohno spent several years on these films with documentary filmmaker Chiaki Nagano, during a break from performing on stage in the early 1970s. In the weeks before the live shows, the festival screens all three, each at a different London venue.
Portrait of Mr. O at Birkbeck, Friday 16 October
The first film in the trilogy (1969, 65 minutes) was shot over about a year, in and around Ohno’s home, the boiler room of the girls’ school where he was working as a PE teacher, the uninhabited island of Sarushima in Tokyo Bay and Hōshōji Temple in Yokohama. Nagano described his camerawork as dancing alongside Ohno, and the result sits somewhere between documentary and dance film. It screens at Birkbeck Cinema, 43 Gordon Square, from 7pm, introduced by Dr Irene González-López of Birkbeck and festival director Mai Burns. Booking is free. Our review of Portrait of Mr O looks at how much of later butoh is already there in this early film.
Mandala of Mr. O at Goldsmiths, Friday 30 October
Nagano shot the second film (1971) on a mountain in Gunma and on Sarushima, an uninhabited island in Tokyo Bay, filming Ohno, with Kei Katō, Moritsuna Nakamura and Atsuko Onodera, as he danced in response to each landscape. This screening is the UK premiere of a new digital remaster. It starts at 7pm at the RHB Cinema, Goldsmiths, Lewisham Way, with a short introduction from Mai Burns, and tickets are free.
Mr. O’s Book of the Dead at The Garden Cinema, Thursday 12 November
The final film (1973) is the only one of the three in colour. It was shot across Japan, from Lake Shikotsu in Hokkaido to a pig farm in Kanagawa, and features Ohno with a troupe of his students, Uesugi among them. She joins the audience after the 8pm screening at The Garden Cinema on Parker Street for a Q&A about making it. Tickets are £15, or £12 for members. The screening has already sold out, but the cinema is running a waiting list. The film carries an 18 certificate and runs 88 minutes. For a closer look at its imagery, read our review of Mr O’s Book of the Dead.
Entering the Unknown, a full day butoh workshop
Entering the Unknown is an open level intensive for adults aged 18 and over, and no butoh or dance experience is needed. At Dance City in Newcastle on Wednesday 18 November it runs from 10am to 5pm with a 45 minute lunch break. MUTSUMINEIRO lead the morning through stillness and improvisation, Seiji Tanaka takes the early afternoon, and Uesugi closes the day with Takamatsu in a session she shapes around the people in the room.
The London edition at The Place runs on Sunday 15 November from 10.30am to 5.30pm, priced £80 or £60 for concessions, and booking is now open. The Newcastle day is the cheaper option at £40, or £25 for concessions.
Mother Forest at Dance City and a butoh day in Bangor
Mother Forest travels to Dance City in Newcastle on Tuesday 17 November at 7.30pm, with tickets at £16, or £14.50 for concessions. After the 60 minute performance, Dr Fusako Innami leads a 45 minute conversation, supported by British Sign Language interpreters and a Japanese translator.
In North Wales, Storiel in Bangor hosts Butoh North Wales on Saturday 24 October as part of the Museum Festival of Wales. The day includes an exhibition on the history of butoh, a talk from Mai Burns and North Wales dancer Melissa Pasut, and a screening of Uesugi’s Melancholia – A Portrait of M. Pasut closes the day with a short live performance that also pays tribute to the late Welsh butoh dancer Dymphna D’Arcy.
Getting to The Place on Duke’s Road
The Place is at 17 Duke’s Road, London WC1H 9PY, a few minutes’ walk from Euston station and close to King’s Cross St Pancras. Buses stop at the British Library and on Upper Woburn Place. The box office opens at least 30 minutes before each performance, and the bar is open on show nights.
The Place
The festival continues in Norway after the UK dates. Every booking link is on the Rebellious Bodies Festival website.
