Queer Butoh Festival Returns to Brooklyn With Four Nights of Radical Performance June 24 through June 27

Queer Butoh Festival Returns to Brooklyn With Four Nights of Radical Performance

June 24 through June 27

Presented by Vangeline Theater/New York Butoh Institute, the 2026 festival brings artists from Mexico, Belgium, South Korea, Singapore, Chile and the United States to The Brick Theater during Pride Month.

There are dance festivals, and then there are gatherings that feel closer to an invocation. The 2026 Queer Butoh Festival, presented by Vangeline Theater/New York Butoh Institute, belongs to the latter category.

Returning to New York City from June 24 through June 27, 2026, the festival will take over The Brick Theater in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with four evenings of interdisciplinary performance, ritual, sound, movement and embodied experimentation. Performances begin at 8 p.m. nightly at The Brick, 579 Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn. Tickets start at $25.

Celebrating a decade of radical performance and queer artistic exploration, the Queer Butoh Festival arrives during Pride Month with a program that reflects both the international reach of Butoh and the continuing urgency of LGBTQ+ performance in New York City. This year’s lineup brings together local and international artists from Mexico, Belgium, South Korea, Singapore, Chile and across the United States, placing Butoh in conversation with contemporary identity, resistance, memory and transformation.

The festival will feature performances across all four nights by Fana Muñoz and Moisés Regla of Mexico, Camille Raséra of Belgium, Miu Kim of South Korea, and Dani Cole of New York City.

Additional featured artists include Milo Longenecker of the United States on June 24 and 25; Zo Roze of the United States on June 24 and 27; Oscar Suh-Rodriguez of Chile and the United States on June 25 and 26; Eric Lichtenstein of the United States on June 26; and Robyn Wong Min Xuan of Singapore on June 27.

For audiences familiar with Butoh, the festival offers a rare opportunity to see the form through a fiercely contemporary queer lens. For the curious, it is an invitation into one of performance’s most mysterious and physically demanding traditions. Emerging in postwar Japan, Butoh has long been associated with transformation, psychological intensity, the body’s hidden histories and the refusal of easy beauty. In the hands of queer artists, that refusal becomes especially charged: a way to examine gender, trauma, eroticism, exile, survival, and the politics of being seen.

That is where Vangeline has built much of her life’s work.

A New York-based teacher, choreographer and dancer specializing in Japanese Butoh, Vangeline is the artistic director of Vangeline Theater/New York Butoh Institute and one of the field’s most visible contemporary advocates. Her work has helped expand Butoh’s presence in the 21st century through performance, research, education, activism and social engagement. At a time when arts institutions are still being asked who gets centered, who gets funded, and who gets remembered, her platform has consistently made room for artists and communities historically pushed aside.

Through her all-female dance company, Vangeline has created choreographic works that connect Butoh with activism and social practice. She is the founder of the New York Butoh Institute Festival, which uplifts women in Butoh and Queer Butoh and centers LGBTQ+ voices within the form. She is also the creator of the Dream a Dream Project, an award-winning program now in its 18th year that brings Butoh into correctional facilities across New York State.

Vangeline’s philosophy treats Butoh not simply as performance but as a tool for personal and collective transformation. Her work makes room for the full human spectrum: beauty, fear, grief, desire, darkness, resilience, and renewal.

Her choreography has been presented internationally in Chile, Germany, Italy, France, Finland, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan. She is the recipient of a 2026 National Endowment for the Arts Dance Award for her upcoming work “Unforgotten: Butoh for 9/11,” as well as a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Dance Award for “The Slowest Wave,” a project exploring the intersection of Butoh and neuroscience. Her additional honors include a 2022–2023 Gibney Dance in Process Residency, a 2018 NYFA/NYSCA Fellowship in Choreography for “Elsewhere,” the 2015 Gibney Dance Social Action Award and the 2019 Janet Arnold Award from the Society of Antiquaries of London. She was also recently awarded a fellowship at Wadham College, University of Oxford, for the 2026–2027 academic year.

Her work has drawn praise from critics nationally and internationally, with The New York Times calling it “captivating” and The Los Angeles Times noting that she “moves with the clockwork deliberation of a practiced Japanese Butoh artist.”

Beyond the stage, Vangeline has taught at Princeton University, Cornell University, NYU, Brooklyn College, CUNY, Sarah Lawrence College, and Duke University. Her artistic reach extends into film and music as well, including a role opposite James Franco and Winona Ryder in Jay Anania’s 2012 feature “The Letter,” and commissions from Grammy Award-winning artists Esperanza Spalding, Skrillex and David J. of Bauhaus.

She is also the author of “Butoh: Cradling Empty Space,” a book examining the relationship between Butoh and neuroscience, and led the first scientific study measuring the effects of Butoh on the brain through “The Slowest Wave.” Her work has been featured on CNN’s Great Big Story, the BBC’s “Deeply Human” podcast with Dessa, and her own podcast, “Butoh Musing with Vangeline.”

The 2026 festival also comes during a busy year for Vangeline. Her new work “MAN WOMAN,” created in collaboration with Machine Dazzle and Ray Barragan Sweeten, premiered at La MaMa Moves Festival in April 2026 and will be presented at the Schwarzman Centre, University of Oxford, on September 16, 2026. She will also perform her new solo “Naiad Metal” at Lincoln Center from August 5 through August 8, 2026.

The Brick Theater, the festival’s Brooklyn home, is a fitting venue for the occasion. Founded in 2002, The Brick has become one of Williamsburg’s essential experimental performance spaces, presenting theater, dance, video, visual arts, virtual reality and boundary-pushing live work. With hundreds of performances each year and a commitment to accessible ticketing, The Brick remains a home for artists willing to take risks and audiences willing to follow them.

That sense of risk is central to the Queer Butoh Festival. Over the past decade, it has created space for artists working outside the comfort of conventional dance, theater, and identity-based performance. It does not offer Pride Month as branding. It offers Pride as practice: a body in motion, a body in refusal, a body insisting on its own language.

The 2026 Queer Butoh Festival runs June 24 through June 27 at 8 p.m. at The Brick Theater, 579 Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11211. 

Tickets start at $25. For more information, visit vangeline.com and bricktheater.com.