IT'S GONNA BE WILD!
WELCOME TO THE 2025 ADIRONDACK BUTOH DANCE FESTIVAL
Welcome to the first It’s Gonna Be Wild Adirondack Butoh Dance Festival — held outdoors on the grounds of the Quarry House Retreat, a stunning former quarry turned community arts sanctuary at the foothills of the Adirondacks. Featuring unforgettable performances by dancers from Montreal, NYC, and the Capital Region.
I’m your host, Katherine Adamenko — Butoh dancer, performance artist, and longtime wild woman of the stage. For over 30 years, I’ve performed in festivals across the US, UK, Europe, and Canada. Now, it’s time I created one of my own.
The Adirondack Butoh Festival is a brand-new offering from the House of Ladypants, dedicated to experimental performance and creative connection in the Capital Region and beyond. I’m thrilled to bring Butoh to Glens Falls, a rising mecca of local arts and culture, and to cultivate space for regional, national, and international artists to gather, share, and transform together.
This festival is also the latest offshoot of Endlessly Performing Art, a global performance project launched by dancer and curator Marco Nektan during the pandemic. Artists from around the world came together virtually, posting one performance video a day for an entire year — and this is how we met. Since then, the community has bloomed into live events: first It’s Gonna Be Hot in Serbia, then It’s Gonna Be Noir in Montreal, and now — It’s Gonna Be Wild in upstate New York.
With love,
Katherine Adamenko / House of Ladypants
Questions?: Email iamladypants@gmail.com. See who else is attending at our Facebook Event Page.
What is Butoh Dance?
Butoh is an avant-garde form of dance-theater that originated in Japan in the aftermath of World War II. It arose as a response to cultural trauma, repression, and the desire for new modes of expression outside traditional or Western dance forms.
Developed by founders Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno in the 1950s and 60s, Butoh is characterized by its slow, controlled movement, use of imagery, and exploration of the unconscious. Performances often incorporate themes of transformation, decay, nature, ritual, and the extremes of human experience.
Butoh is not based on set steps or choreography. Instead, movement arises from internal states — such as memory, emotion, or sensation — and the dancer’s response to imagined images or environments. The body becomes a medium through which invisible or hidden aspects of life are made visible.
Today, Butoh has grown into a global movement practiced and adapted by artists across cultures. It continues to evolve as a space for deep inquiry, personal expression, and interdisciplinary performance.
Kazuo Ohno, photo by Ethan Hoffman, p. 46 from "Butoh: Dance of the Dark Soul"