Yuko Kaseki

Yuko Kaseki is a director, choreographer, teacher and Butoh dancer who has lived in Berlin long and short enough. She has been searching for a way to penetrate the space between physical and spiritual expression. Every day she trains her perception to find the moment of extraordinary in the ordinary.

Yuko Kaseki studied Butoh dance and performing arts at the University of Art Braunschweig (HBK Braunschweig) under Anzu Furukawa. From 1989 to 2000, she danced in Furukawa's companies Dance Butter Tokyo and Verwandlungsamt.

In 1995, Yuko Kaseki and Marc Ates founded the dance company cokaseki – an ensemble dedicated to performative research at the intersection of dance, visual art and experimental music. In numerous international projects, they create live events and improvisations in theatres, galleries, site-specific spaces and films, often in collaboration with a wide range of performers and musicians. Her strong interest in expanding the boundaries of physical expression has also led to collaborations with artists of mixed abilities, including work with Theater Thikwa (Berlin), Roland Walter (Berlin), Sung Kuk Kang (Seoul) and Zan-Chen Liao (Taipei).

Since 2004, she has also curated and performed in the ongoing improvisation series AMMO-NITE GIG (Vol. 1–48 and counting), featuring international performers and musicians.

Yuko Kaseki was awarded a Tanzpraxis scholarship (2021–22) and a DIS-TANZ SOLO grant (2021). From 2012 to 2013, she was an artist fellow at the International Research Center Interweaving Performance Cultures at the Free University of Berlin.

She has participated in numerous festivals, most recently including Berlin Atonal 2023 (Berlin), Kyoto International Butoh Festival 2022 (Kyoto, Japan), and MaerzMusik 2022 (Berlin).