Sunday morning. I am thinking about Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Obama, the Citizens Group That Will Not Forgive Special Privileges for Koreans in Japan (Zaitokukai), over-farming of fish, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, genocide in Darfur, net neutrality, America’s prison industrial complex, the prisoners at Guantanamo for 8 years now? I’m thinking of all the problems I cannot even name because I can’t remember them all or haven’t learned of them yet. Deforestation, the continuing destruction by oil companies of land and water- especially worse in non-Western countries, young girls being kidnapped and made sex-slaves, people dying of drug overdoses, the complete destruction of the African-American family structure by prison, unemployment, poverty all over the world, the North Korean repression of its people, police brutality, capital punishment, femicide, gender inequalities, Josef Fritzl’s family. (more…)

Eat Me & Drink Me is an experimental multimedia performance-art, “Butoh-vocal theatre” work being jointly created by Eseohe Arhebamen, Douglas Allen, Jorge Rojas, Wura-Natasha Ogunji and Rosamond S. King.

The photo below is from a scene written by Jorge Rojas.

Project Website (itself an ongoing performance artwork) http://eatmedrink.wordpress.com/

An extension of butoh-vocal theatre workshops held by Edoheart (Eseohe Arhebamen) at New York’s multiple-OBIE award winning Living Theatre, our purpose as an ensemble stems from our multidisciplinary backgrounds in the arts, our united interest in experimental performance art and our own sociopolitical perspectives as persons of “other” categories. An allegory of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the Eucharist and a reference to a function of celebrity in American mass media culture, Eat Me & Drink Me is a unique performance experience dealing with themes of perception, sacrifice and consumption.
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AVANT-GARDE NIGERIAN ARTIST DEVELOPS BUTOH-VOCAL THEATRE

In August, Eseohe Arhebamen led a Butoh dance workshop at The Living Theatre, a performance space located in downtown Manhattan.  Known as the “Dance of Darkness,” Butoh is a contemporary avant-garde dance form which was originally performed in Japan in 1959. Butoh combines dance, theater, improvisation and influences from the Japanese artist tradition and performance art.

Born in West Africa, Nigeria, Eseohe is an international multi-media performer residing in Brooklyn, NY. She is also known on stage and in performance, as Edoheart. Eseohe has taught different art forms to adults and children for many years in Detroit and New York; as Edoheart, she intimately incorporates language into her Butoh dance workshops.

An award winning poet, writer, and student of both Butoh and African theater, it is Eseohe’s “passion for language” (her own Nigeria boasts 512 of them) that has led her to explore “the semiotic nature of audio/visual communication” and “the channeling of language through movement.” Typically known for its extreme imagery and white-body makeup, the addition of vocalizations to the art form is quite an innovation coming from the Nigerian artist. (more…)

During my visit to Estonia recently as part of the Diverse Universe 2009 European tour in which I participated, I was invited to perform at The Writer’s House in Estonia by curator, Al Paldrok. I read from my chapbook, Seeding the Clouds (Ornithology Press, 2003) and to demonstrate how I become language, I also gave my butoh-vocal theatre performance of my poem-dance choreography, “eAIR Butoh”. Post performance, I was approached backstage by a woman who introduced herself to me tearfully, told me she was quite moved by my work and that she too was a poet and visual artist. Below is one of the gifts she gave me, an excellent poem.

Punk’s song

Infested with high science
like a rash-ridden man
fuck you!,
you nuclear shroom groomer –
let punk be the name for the century!

What are you staring at with these slit eyes?
Progress soiled his pants, or rather pissed.

Mother’s milk not tasted, fathers unknown,
young slut’s tits as the only remorse,

came the punk, intriguing on the rush hour
urinating freely, boldly and with anger,

successfully ridiculing the bourgeois,
born to a world, where the wanking humanity,

shed all the ideals, reaches an orgasm,
having stroked the brains with his palm.

written by Kai-Mai Olbri
(Translated by Tristan Priimägi)
www.kai-mai.pri.ee