Improv Butoh rises again at Kokoro Dance’s KW Studios, August 21
Guitarist Cole Schmidt performs at a jazz-driven music-and-dance series reborn after the June passing of Tony Wilson
Jay Hirabayashi and Barbara Bourget
Cole Schmidt
Vanessa Goodman. Photo by David Cooper
Kokoro Dance presents Improv Butoh at KW Studios on August 21
IMPROVISATION IS A core element in both jazz and butoh dance—and the two have long met at Kokoro Dance’s Butoh Jazz nights.
But that series’s regular music performer, the revered, inventive jazz guitarist Tony Wilson, passed away in June. In honour of Wilson, Kokoro Dance’s Jay Hirabayashi and Barbara Bourget reached out to Wilson’s long-time friend, jazz guitarist and programmer Cole Schmidt, to continue the series—now renamed Improv Butoh, but still held at Kokoro’s intimate underground home base, KW Studios.
Schmidt is part of the psychedelic chamber jazz ensemble SICK BOSS, drone improv unit LETTR OPENR, and a collaborative project with cellist and composer Peggy Lee, Forever Stories of: Moving Parties. Joining him on the improv-driven musical side for the evening is Alvaro Rojas, another local composer and guitarist whose projects include Afro-Peruvian jazz-prog outfit GRAN KASA and whose concert pieces have been performed by new-music groups from the Turning Point Ensemble to Microcosmos String Quartet.
Providing the moves are Vancouver dance-scene icons Bourget and Hirabayashi themselves, as well as special guest Vanessa Goodman, the celebrated artistic director of Action at a Distance who’s choreographed recent work like WAIL and cocreated the hit touring show Graveyards and Gardens.
Together, they’ll express themselves in the moment to the sounds of live music. As Hirabayashi has put it: “We never know what they are going to play or what our responses will be. We know that it is always a conversation—a call from them and a response from us that is also a call back to them.” 
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