(Re)discover Your Body – Somatic Movement & Butoh Basics (beginner-friendly)

• want to enjoy moving again (without performance pressure)
• as a bodyworker or massage therapist, you’re looking for new tools & inspiration
• are a dancer, actor or performer wanting new impulses and presence
• are curious about Butoh as an exploratory practice (no experience needed)

A down-to-earth movement workshop for people who want to move – also for bodyworkers and curious beginners.
In this two-day workshop, Stefano Taiuti shares a practical, somatic approach to movement: how movement works from the inside – through sensation, awareness, and intention. This way, your body becomes more accessible and expressive, and movement feels really good again (or for the first time).

You don’t need a dance background. The workshop is especially suitable for bodyworkers and massage therapists – as well as for dancers, actors, performers, and anyone who wants to reconnect with their body in a realistic, non-dogmatic way.

What you’ll take home:

• simple tools to access movement through felt sense (somatic awareness)
• more ease, range and clarity in your movement
• Butoh-inspired practices for subtlety, intensity and expression
• guided improvisation with imagery (“dance by images”)
• ideas you can integrate into your practice, training or creative work

How we’ll work (modular structure)

Each session explores one quality of movement through:

• warm-up & stretching
• somatic movement exploration + Butoh basics
• “dance by images” (guided movement improvisation)

Partner exercises may be included, always optional.

There is floorwork (working on the ground). Stefano adapts intensity and exercises to the level and needs of the group.

Butoh, (in)famously, defies description. It is often reduced only to an examination of the striking imagery it sometimes produces (grotesque contortions, stark white make-up etc.), but the heart of Butoh is in the process.

Butoh presents an exploratory series of tools for finding the body, and learning to be in control of losing control. It is a practice that, fundamentally, asks us to fully confront ourselves as inseparable from our ailing bodies and the universe they bleed and dissolve into.

In simple terms:
Butoh is a movement practice that opens up new ways of moving through awareness, inner imagery, and sensation – often subtle, sometimes intense, always explorative. It’s not about looking “right,” but about discovering the body from the inside out.

What is behind a movement? What does it generate, both visibly and invisibly? “The Spiritual Mechanism”, as Stefano calls it, is a unique approach to dance and self discovery. Stefano integrates western movement analyses focusing on the visible, and Butoh to explore the invisible, the subtle.

Stefano Taiuti is a performance artist, Butoh dancer, and bodyworker. For over 30 years, he has explored the moving body as a tool of expression, trained with renowned mime teachers and Butoh masters, and developed his own methodology from this, combining Western movement analysis with Butoh.

The founders of the Refugium met him as a teacher in the Lomi Ausbildung Berlin – and immediately knew that we wanted to invite him to Aschaffenburg for a workshop.

120€ per person

Comfortable clothing that allows you to move

The workshop will be in English.