Daisuke Yoshimoto

Daisuke Yoshimoto graduated in art from the Theatre Department at the Nippon University in 1967. Since the early years of his stage career, he collaborated and co-created performances with the greatest Butoh masters such as Hisayo Iwaki, Yukihiko Sakai and Kazuo Ohno (as a stage manager for La Argentina in 1977 and My Mother in 1981). In 1983 he created his first Butoh piece, The Head of the Bird Woman. He has performed in many countries, including Austria, Denmark, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Norway, Ukraine, Hungary, Italy and the USA. He first time came to Poland as a stage manager with the group Ner-Kyōgen (Tokyo) to take part in an international festival of student theatres organized by Bogusław Litwiniec and Teatr Kalambur in Wrocław. In the 1990s he visited Poland several times with his pieces Eros and Thanatos (2004) and Ruined Body (2008), which he presented in Kraków, Lublin, Olsztyn, Poznań, Szczecin, Warsaw and Wrocław (at the invitation of the Grotowski Centre and the Grotowski Institute). In 1997 he was the artistic consultant of a Butoh festival conceived and held by the Grotowski Centre. In 2003 he collaborated with Teatr ZAR on Gospels of Childhood as a dancer in a piece called Lazarus. In 2010, together with Jacek Ostaszewski and the music group Osjan, he performed Ruined Body in the Grand Theatre and National Opera in Warsaw and at the Cross-Culture Festival to mark the 40th anniversary of Osjan. In 2013 he staged Kyokatabira of the Body in Wrocław as part of the 2nd International Theatre Festival “The World as a Place of Truth”. In 2013, also in Wrocław, he performed the action Witness as part of the “Armine, Sister” project.