NOGUCHI TAISO Class Series With Melissa Lohman to Return to NY Butoh Institute

Vangeline Theater, home of New York Butoh Institute, will present a Noguchi Taiso Class Series with Melissa Lohman, on Monday, August 10, 17, 24, and 31, 2026, from 6pm-8pm at 115 Wooster Street, New York, NY, 10012. Each class is $25. For more information and to register, visit here.

Noguchi Taiso is a Japanese body release practice developed by Michizo Noguchi that emphasizes relaxation, fluidity, and responsiveness to gravity. Widely practiced by Butoh dancers, it serves as a foundational training method for cultivating receptivity, effortless movement, and bodily awareness. Beginners are welcome.

Melissa Lohman is a teacher, performer, choreographer, and visual artist from New York City, currently based in Rome, Italy. She received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2000. Since the mid-1990s, she has created performances for theaters, museums, galleries, and unconventional spaces internationally. Her artistic practice explores inhabiting a space and being observed, rather than presenting something to an audience.

Recent projects include Lean (2026), a performance-installation with Flavio Arcangeli presented at the Nervi Pavilion in Rome for Open House Rome XIV Edition; Contemplate Your Navel! (2025), a solo exhibition featuring performances, drawings, video, sculpture, and a series of movement and drawing workshops; and Tramite (2024), a performance created within Fabrizio Crisafulli's light installation of the same title, presented in the burial chamber of the Pyramid of Caius Cestius in Rome as part of Piramide Contemporaneo.

In 2023, Melissa performed a durational work for Crisafulli's installation Transiti at the Academy of Fine Arts of Carrara. In 2022, she danced alongside her Noguchi Taiso teacher, Mari Osanai, in Deposition at the Kyoto International Butoh Festival. That same year, she collaborated with Flavio Arcangeli on Across, a site-specific performance at MAXXI Museum in Rome presented during The Heretical Body: Butoh Dance from Its Inception Until Today. Earlier projects include A Sweet Topia (2021), a site-specific performance and solo exhibition at Museo delle Mura in Rome. From 2018 to 2020, she was an invited performer at the New York Butoh Institute Festival.