ButohDrawing projects

2015 

BUTOHPHOTO, workshop

Gray Loft Gallery, Oakland, California.

2006

BUTOHDRAWING, workshops

California College of the Arts, Oakland, California

2005

BUTOHDRAWING, performances

California College of the Arts, Oakland, California

BUTOHDRAWING, workshops 

California College of the Arts, Oakland, California

Butoh & WINE, performance  
C. G. Di Arie Vinyard & Winery, Mt. Aukum, California
  

Butoh OVAL, performance 

California State University, Hayward, California   

 

2004

BUTOHDRAWING, workshops  

California College of the Arts, Oakland, California 

  

2003  

SAMSARA, performance   
Sculpture Grove, Paradise Wood, California   

ButoHDRAWING, performance   

Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco, California       

steps, performance  

Marin Horzon School, Fairfax, California  

SHADOW DRAW, workshops   

California College of Arts & Crafts, San Francisco, California  
         

2000

BUTOH SKIRT, workshop   California 
California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA     

ButoHDRAWING, workshops    
The Monagri Foundation Centre for Contemporary Art,   
Archangelos Monastery, Monagri, Cyprus     

ButoHDRAWING, performance     
Lithica, Citadella, Menorca, Spain     

ButoHDRAWING, performance     
Fulbright Center, Buffer Zone, Nicosia, Cyprus    

ButoHDRAWING, performance  
HP Gallery, Northern Nicosia, Cyprus     

1999

ButoHDRAWING, performance   
Timken Lecture Hall Foyer     
California College of Arts & Crafts, San Francisco, CA   

ACTION/REACTION: IMPETUS & RESIDUE, performance 
Nahl Hall, California College of Arts & Crafts, Oakland, California    

BUTOHDRAWING, performance    
Oliver Art Center, California College of Arts & Crafts, Oakland, California  

1997 

ACTION/REACTION: IMPETUS & RESIDUE, performance    
Dance Ground, San Francisco, California      

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Gray Loft Gallery Uptown ~ Tom White

      

Tom White - Puzzle 2025                                     

 

 

Tom White, is Professor Emeritus at California College of the Arts, where his groundbreaking journey with Butohdrawing started in 1997 with his first performance, ButohDrawing and the Passage of Time, at CCAC. That same year, he collaborated with Betty Jo Costanzo, Malia Oliver, and Styrous® on Action/Reaction, launching a series of performance projects.    

 

 

Betty Jo Costanzo & Tom White - 2005  

Butohdrawing: Pentagon VS Hexagon 

photo by Mark Neibauer 

Tom, with artists Betty Jo Costanzo and Styrous®, brought the Butohdrawing Project to the Monagri Foundation in Cyprus in 2000. During his sabbatical in Barcelona that same year, he introduced Butohdrawing workshops at La Poderosa and expanded the practice internationally with performances in Europe, China, Mexico, and the US.         

 

installation photos by Styrous® 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Max 

 

 

 

 

 Boogie Woogie

 

 

 

 

Cat Girl 

 

 

Kitchen Sink 

 

 

 

Nautical 

 

 

 

Sharp & Shiney 

 

 

 

 

Trine E 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Orchard / Galleries on 25 

489 – 25th Street, 

Oakland, CA 

 

Gallery Hours: 

First Fridays, 5:00 - 8:00 pm 

Fridays and Saturdays 12:00 – 5:00 p.m. 

and by appointment     

     
      

Viewfinder link:       

                 

Betty Jo Costanzo           

Styrous® 

Tom White                                                     

     

Net link:       

                

Betty Jo Costanzo 

Styrous® 

Ha Tom White        
        

YouTube link:                

        
butohddrawing ~ tik tak toe         
        
        
        
        
        
Styrous® ~ Tuesday, December 9, 2025         
        

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ButohPhoto Workshop @ the Gray Loft Gallery

   

Butohdrawing Performance, Cyprus 2000

 video still

ButohPhoto Workshop 
offered at Gray Loft Gallery

ButohPhoto
A workshop by
Tom White, Betty Jo Costanzo, Styrous and Kyung Lee 

 Workshop: Wednesday and Thursday, August 12 – 13, 

6:00 to 9:00 pm
 
ButohPhoto Performance by class participants at 

Gray Loft Gallery:
2nd Friday ArtWalk, August 14, 7:00 pm

The workshop will be directed by Tom White, Betty Jo Costanzo and Styrous. For more than two decades they have created workshops domestically and internationally including a residency in Cyprus where they created and performed ButohDrawing.

For more information about the instructors, please visit their websites:
Tom White, Betty Jo Costanzo, Styrous and Kyung Lee.

The two-day workshop will consist of learning the Butoh discipline – which is a way to discover how to perceive the world through peripheral vision and all of our six senses – the elements of Butoh movement and performance.

The instructors will demonstrate how the act of taking a photo with Butoh heightened perception is a way of seeing the world around us in a very unusual way.  Smart phones and video cameras will be used to record and project the collected images into the gallery space.

The conclusion of the two-day workshop will be a Friday performance, where the participants will incorporate the concepts learned at the workshop, presented during the monthly 2nd Friday ArtWalk at
Gray Loft Gallery at 7:00 pm.
 

For more info on Butohdrawing, click here and here.

 

Workshop Details:
Open to ten participants  (sign up today - space is limited)
Wednesday and Thursday, August 12 – 13, 6:00 to 9:00 pm
2nd Friday ArtWalk, August 14, 7:00 pm: ButohPhoto Performance by workshop participants
Performance experience not required
Bring a smart phone or small camera
$100 donation to the Gray Loft Gallery  (sliding scale available)
Contact the gallery to register by August 1.  

Butohdrawing Performance, Cyprus 2000

GRAY LOFT GALLERY
2889 Ford Street, third floor, Oakland
(not wheelchair accessible)

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Happy Birthday, Tom ~ 2024

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Tom White - Friday, October 18, 2024. 

photo by Styrous®           

 

 

        

        

        

        

        

Viewfinder links:        

         

ButohDrawing          

Tom White         

        

Net links:        

         

ButohDrawing          

Tom White         

        

YouTube links:        

        

ButohDrawing                    

butohdrawing tik tak toe         

        

        

         

        

        

Happy Birthday, my love!

        

         

        

         

        

Styrous® ~ Saturday, October 19, 2024                 

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Thornton Wilder, Grace Wilder, Telegraph Hill & ButohDrawing

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Thornton Wilder - 1920

Yale University

photo: Roger Sherman Studio

      

Today is the birthday of American playwright and novelist, Thornton Wilder. Born on April 17, 1897, in Madison, Wisconsin. He won three Pulitzer Prizes: for the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and for the plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth. He also won a U.S. National Book Award for the novel The Eighth Day.      

 

I have an indirect connection with Wilder on several levels. When I was in my English Lit class in high school, one of the books I read for one of my book reports was his novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. His novel had a profound impact on me as it was my first awareness of Chance Operation where time, things, people, events converge with no obvious plan but effect those involved in different ways (link below). This was long before I had heard of John Cage, Charles Ives, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Alan Hovhaness with their concepts of Aleatoric music; then 30 years later applying the concept to the ButohDrawing performances by Tom White that resulted from it (link below).    

Another level was in the early sixties, when I was acting and appeared in a performance of The Skin of Our Teeth; I met his nice, Grace Wilder who had been involved with theater her whole life. She was a delightful old lady who had a wonderful sense of humor and told amazing stories. I remember visiting her home/studio perched on the side of Telegraph Hill where she had been living for decades. The area by then was nothing but rundown housing inhabited by outcasts and artists; characters that could have been right out of the Cannery Row novel by John Steinbeck. The structures had been built sometime in the 1800's and had survived the 1906 Earthquake but were dilapidated and probably very dangerous. A story in a 1947 newspaper stated that "the reason Telegraph Hill was reasonably safe in 1906, was due to how the "Italians and Spanish kept it from burning by quenching, with buckets of red wine and wine-soaked blankets, the flames that threatened their tinder-dry frame houses and board shanties." Seems to me the alcohol in the wine would have added to the fire, but what do I know?      

 

There was an abandoned quarry just below her place that threatened all the buildings on her side of the hill. In 1927, Philo Farnsworth invented the first fully functional all-electronic image pickup device video camera tube and produced the first electronic television transmission in his Green Street lab in the Telegraph Hill quarry.      

 

 

Telegraph Hill - ca 1885 

Photo: San Francisco History Center

San Francisco Public Library

 

 

As far as I can remember, her studio was somewhere in the area I've circled in red in the above photograph I cropped:    

 

 

 

There were two or three huge casement widows that swiveled up in her studio and you could see the San Francisco bay. The photo below is from 1878 but take the church out of it (I don't remember seeing it) and the view looked pretty much the same.    

      

      

Telegraph Hill - 1878
 photo by Henry Guttmann

      

 

The paths along the way to get to the dwellings on the hill were all made of wood and I remember the steep stairs and uneven walkways were rickety and scary.     

 

On January 2, 1857, a newspaper reported about the graveyard on Telegraph Hill:  

"During the late storm a miniature avalanche of rock and dirt occurred at a quarry on Telegraph Hill, in Sansome Street North of Vallejo. The fall exposed several coffins which were buried high up on the hill, and on examination it was found that a great number of graves were scattered about. A headboard in one place bore the following inscription: "Here lies the remains of James Anderson, seaman on board the U.S.F. Congress, a native of Canterbury, England, died July 16, 1847, aged 41 years. The coffins were in remarkable state of preservation.      

The Telegraph Hill Dwellers site (link below) states that Telegraph Hill has had a series of names through its history. Allegedly the Spanish called it Loma Alta. Others referred to it as Clark's Point, Prospect Hill, Signal Hill, Windmill Hill, Goat Hill and Tin Can Hill (fits in with Steinbeck's Cannery Row).         

Telegraph Hill map

Telegraph Hill Dwellers

 

The Bridge of San Luis Rey has been translated to film in 1929, 1944, 1958 (for TV) and in 2004 with F. Murray Abraham, Kathy Bates, Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel, and a score written by Lalo Schifrin. In 2018 it was adapted for the stage by David Greenspan.         

 

 

The Bridge of San Luis Rey - 1929

movie poster

 

 

The Bridge of San Luis Rey - 2004

movie poster 

 

 

Some time in the seventies, I think, the old buildings on Telegraph Hill were demolished to build condos but Grace had died long before that happened.    

      

      

     

Viewfinder links:

     

ButohDrawing     

John Cage      

Robert De Niro            

Philo T. Farnsworth        

Alan Hovhaness      

Charles Ives   

Karlheinz Stockhausen      

Tom White           

     

Net links:

      

The Bridge of San Luis Rey plot        

ButohDrawing         

Chance Operation     

Found San Francisco ~ Telegraph Hill's Architectural Survivors      

KQED ~ Remember the Quarries of Telegraph Hill            

NY Times ~ S F Journal; Shaky Edifice Sits Atop A Neighborhood Crisis     

SF Gate ~ Decades of dynamite reshaped Telegraph Hill     

Telegraph Hill Dwellers ~ Walking the Historic District        

Tom White     

     

YouTube links:

      

The Bridge of San Luis Rey         

Sam Waterston ~ The Bridge of San Luis Rey (audio bok)         

The Bridge of San Luis Rey (review)        

PBS ~ Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill     

The House on Telegraph Hill (1951) (complete movie)        

     

     

     

     

     

     

"My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, 

but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate."

            ~ Thornton Wilder

     

     

     

Styrous® ~ Saturday, April 17, 2021   

 

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ButohDrawing

Tom White, an artist trained as a painter, has developed a visual program called ButohDrawing; an interface of video, digital info and movement . . non static most of the time. He uses Japanese Butoh movement to perform site-specific drawings; Butoh discipline as a vehicle to investigate alternative modes of cultural production.

He has performed ButohDrawing regionally & nationally; in Europe, Mexico, China, Jerusalem and as artist in residence at the Monagri Foundation in Cyprus.


He is Professor Emeritus at the California College of the Arts (CCA) in Oakland, CA.  

BFA, Cranbrook Academy of Art; MA, MFA, University of California, Berkeley. 

More of his work can be seen in his Ovation TV profile.  


Styrous® - August 17, 2009

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Thornton Wilder

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Thornton Wilder, born on Saturday, April 17, 1897,  was a novelist and playwright who created many world famous works of fiction, The Bridge of San Luis Rey in 1927, Our Town in 1938 and The Skin of Our Teeth in 1942 to name just a few of them. He won the Pulitzer Prize for these works.  

I knew his niece a bazillion years ago; I'd read his San Luis Rey book a few years before I met her, so, when I did meet her, I was dazzled first by her location, then, by HER! It was also the beginning of butohdrawing (links below).     

      

       

Thornton Wilder - 1920 

Yale College graduation photo 

Roger Sherman Studio 

        

       

Viewfinder links:             

       

butohdrawing        

Tom White 

Thornton Wilder          

Thornton Wilder, Grace Wilder, Telegraph Hill & ButohDrawing   

     

Net links:             

       

Britannica ~ Thornton Wilder        

The Wilder Society ~ Wilder Life & Family        

     

YouTube links:             

       

The Bridge of San Luis Rey - A Wilder Moment review                 

The Bridge of San Luis Rey trailor            

The Bridge of San Luis Rey complete film ()             

Lilli Palmer interviews Thornton Wilder 1952       

Our Town 1989 (1 hr., 34 mins., 59 secs.)    

Thornton Wilder Its Time documentary            

Thornton Wilder: A Life (56 mins., 15 secs.)      

             

       

"Now, the razor edge between past & future"

     ~ Thornton Wilder  

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ButohDrawing articles

    
      
ButohDrawing   
butohPhoto Workshop @ the Gray Loft Gallery  butohPhoto all over the world    
ButohDrawing projects    
butohPhoto performance on Vimeo   
 
 

Franz Kafka ~ An Existential Birthday

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Today is the birthday of one of my favorite people in the history of Mankind, Franz Kafka. I equate him in my mind with the sonic genius, John Cage and the two of them formed the basis of Tom's butohDrawing.     

 

Wikipedia:

Franz Kafka was a German-language Jewish Czech writer and novelist born in Prague. Widely regarded as a major figure of 20th-century literature, his works fuse elements of realism and the fantastique, and typically feature isolated protagonists in bizarre or surreal predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. Kafka was born near the Old Town Square in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His family were German-speaking middle-class Ashkenazi Jews.     

My awareness and admiration of Kafka was born in my early teens when I was ass-deep into Sci-Fi. and came across his incredible, novella, The Metamorphosis. Holy ****! It scared the **** out of me and I was irrevocably hooked!     
     
Kafka was born on July 3, 1883. He had a lifelong suspicion that people found him mentally and physically repulsive. But those who met him found him to possess a quiet and cool demeanor, obvious intelligence and a dry sense of humor; they also found him handsome, although of austere appearance. He had the ability to describe a situation realistically with precise details.      

 

 

 

Franz Kafka - 1906 

photographer unknown

 

 

 Franz Kafka - 1910 

photographer unknown

 

 

 Kafka at about ten with his sisters  

Valli (left) and Elli (center) 

 

 

Kafka never married, was supposedly "tortured" by sexual desire and filled with a fear of "sexual failure". He visited brothels for most of his adult life, and his collection of erotica and pornographic photographs demonstrates a connoisseur's range of interest in the genre. In addition, he had close relationships with several women during his lifetime. On 13 August 1912, Kafka met Felice Bauer, who worked in Berlin as a representative of a dictaphone company.  

 

 

 

Felice Bauer & Franz Kafka - 1917 

photographer unknown

 

 

Kafka drew and sketched extensively. His interest in art grew from 1901 to 1906. He "practiced drawing, took drawing classes, attended art history lectures, and sought to establish a connection to Prague's artistic circles". According to Max Brod, Kafka "was even more indifferent, or perhaps better, more hostile to his drawings than he was to his literary production". As he did with his writings, Kafka asked in his testament for his drawings to be destroyed. Brod preserved all of Kafka's drawings that Kafka gave him or that he could rescue from the wastebasket or otherwise, but "[a]nything that I didn't rescue was destroyed". Until May 2021, only about 40 of his drawings were known. In 2022, Yale University Press published Franz Kafka: The Drawings. The book brought to light about 150 sketches by Kafka.       

 

 

 

Franz Kafka ~ Der Denker - 1924

 

 

Kafka's laryngeal tuberculosis worsened and in March 1924 he returned from Berlin to Prague, where members of his family, principally his sister Ottla, as well as Dora Diamant, took care of him. He went to Hugo Hoffmann's sanatorium in Kierling just outside Vienna for treatment on 10 April, and died there on 3 June 1924. 

 

 

Grave of Franz Kafka 
 

 

The cause of death was starvation: the condition of Kafka's throat made eating too painful for him, and since parenteral nutrition had not yet been developed, there was no way to feed him.          
     

           

David Černý - kinetic Head of Franz Kafka - 2014 

"The tremendous world I have inside my head, but how to free myself and free it without being torn to pieces. And a thousand times rather be torn to pieces than retain it in me or bury it. That, indeed, is why I am here, that is quite clear to me." ~ Franz Kafka 

 

Viewfinder links:                   

       

Max Brod        

butohDrawing           

John Cage       

Franz Kafka      

Tom White 

 

YouTube links:                  

 

Franz Kafka: Chronicler of Darkness         

Franz Kafka’s Dark Truth (31 mins., 21 secs.)           

Franz Kafka: The Man Who Begged to Be Forgotten          

Kafka’s Genius Philosophy (33 mins., 50 secs.)          

Kafka’s Metamorphosis Explained – Why We Are All Gregor Samsa    

The Metamorphosis (2 hrs., 8 secs.)          

The 'Philosophy' of Franz Kafka        

Why You Feel Lost in a Loveless World (And How to Stop It)           

Why you NEED to read Franz Kafka           

 

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