Yumiko Yoshioka is a dancer, choreographer, teacher, and art director. She was born in Tokyo in 1953 and has been based in Berlin since 1988.
In 1974 Yumiko was a member of Ariadone, the first female Butoh company, founded by Carlotta Ikeda and Ko Murobushi. In 1978, she performed with Carlotta and Ko in Paris in “Le Dernier Eden- Porte de L’Au-Dela”, the very first Butoh performance to be presented in a public theater outside Japan.
In 1988 she became a co-founder of tatoeba THÉÂTRE DANCE GROTESQUE with Minako Seki and delta RA’i in Berlin (1988 - 1996). Between 1995–2015 she was a core member of TEN PEN CHii art labor, an interdisciplinary and experimental art formation as a dancer and a choreographer along with JoaXhim Manger (visual artist) and Zam Johnson (composer and musician).
Since 2015, Yumiko has been working as a solo dancer and a choreographer. She has also set up various collaborative projects across Europe such as “eX...it!, Dance eXchange Festival” at Schloss Bröllin in Germany, (the last one took place in 2019), dance projects with Gest-Azione, with Annalisa Maggiani from Italy; and dance creations with Rena Konstantaki from Greece.
She has been a supervisor of the “Butoh Lab Camp” project in Romania since 2021. Her workshop “Body Resonance, based on Organic Movement and Butoh” is invited to many countries across the globe.
To learn more about her and her work, visit her website, www.yumiko-yoshioka.com.