“Birds”. Photo by Jevgenija Cholodova

Sakurako (b. 1975), a dancer, choreographer and Butoh dance artist creates dance performances that exist at the intersection of performance art, theatre and contemporary dance. Although Sakurako’s career spans a couple of decades, the Lithuanian audience got acquainted with her work only a few years ago.

Sakurako graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. She discovered her unique style by creating site-specific installations and interventions. Alongside prolific work, Sakurako continued to study Noh theatre and other traditional Eastern martial and performing arts, as well as Butoh dance in Japan. She has been learning Butoh from Ko Murobushi, Yukio Waguri, Natsu Nakajima, Masaki Iwana, Seisaku Kochi, Yumiko Yoshioka and others in Japan and Europe.

In 2012, Sakurako founded the Re-United Now-Here dance theatre and was creating choreography for it in Amsterdam and Paris. Sakurako returned to Lithuania in 2017, and together with the French artist Phil Von founded the dance theatre Okarukas. She creates Butoh dance performances with the young generation Lithuanian dancers and actors, always searching for new forms of expression in performing arts. Sakurako prefers site-specific projects, always striving to create with a specific space and context in mind. Performances created by this choreographer have been shown in Belgium, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, France, Slovenia, Finland, Germany and Ukraine.

In addition to creative work, Sakurako is also an educator: she holds creative workshops for children and youth of all ages, seminars for professionals and workshops open to everyone on Butoh dance, as well as teaches at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre.

The latest performance that Sakurako has been continuously developing since 2018 for the Okarukas troupe is Paukščiai (Birds) based on Aristophanes’ comedy. Butoh dance technique enables the dancers and actors to enter the unknown and awaken deep-seated memories and even DNA memory, as well as experience various metamorphoses, for example, turn into birds caught in the oil spill in the sea. This performance poetically and subtly examines the link between our comfortable consumer life and the pollution of nature, ecology and the planet.

okarukaslt@gmail.com

reunitednowhere.wixsite.com/okarukas