MESA (Movement & Ecology Sanctuary for Art)

5 day Butoh and Ritual Dance Residency/Intensive

At Panya Forest (Northern Thailand)

Food & Lodging Provided ($50/day) 

Feb 9-14 2027 

With optional performance the following weekend in Chiang Mai

Let’s gather in the East this winter to make a deep exchange between our spirits and the land. Come all you beauty-makers, dreamers, artists, and visionaries to help rebuild the temple.

Sometimes we need to gather to renew our commitment to what it is we serve. To remember that what we create in the world from our vision is a gift, and that what we do matters. I know you struggle, but when you take that struggle and make something beautiful, the world is renewed.

Greg and Rhampai (our esteemed hosts) have invited us (esteemed guests) into a unique opportunity to offer a gift, a prayer, and a cultural exchange through their farm and community at Panya Forest.

Panya Forest offers refugees from modernity an opportunity to engage again with natural coexistence by adhering to the original principles of respect and reciprocity. Skills of natural building, ritual farming, seed saving, cooking, beauty-making, and art are all lived and transmitted through communally embodied practices that return villagers to a relational existence rooted in myth, meaning, and shared responsibility. Working closely with neighboring Indigenous communities, the Panya Forest community seeks to be a bridge between land-based peoples and culturally, economically, and technologically rooted friends from around the world.

We are structuring this encounter as a facilitated residency focused on the creation and offering of a ritual performance. Ritual performance means we are not coming to demonstrate, succeed, or even accomplish something as artists. Rather, we are coming to revive an ancient understanding of art as a vital aspect of our responsibility to live beautifully within the web of creation.

This will be a time and place to open to the great generosity of spirit that is the original calling of the artist. Panya Forest is a community where the skills of ritual farming, seed saving, cooking, and art are esteemed for the nourishment they bring to all people. In that spirit, we will nourish, praise, and heal the seeds of visionary hope we each carry in our innermost hearts. Through dance, creative practice, and cultural exchange, we will make a gift for the benefit of all our relations.

Nathan will facilitate this work through the traditions of Butoh and Ritual Dance.

Butoh, originating in post-war Japan, is an avant-garde dance form often described as the “dance of darkness,” yet it is equally a journey toward light. This introspective exploration unfolds as a transformative process that engages the archetypal shadows of body and mind, inviting embodiment, realization, transformation, and liberation in service of life itself. Like the natural cycle of a seed sprouting, flowering, withering, and returning to earth, Butoh embraces the fullness of creative impulse with courage and a love for life that is both unrestricted and expansive.

Ritual Dance honors creativity as a heartfelt offering to sustain life. Through sacred movement, ritual forms, and communal practice, we deepen our connection with human nature and cultivate active participation in the living world.

Each day will include physical training designed to open the joints and energy centers of the body, specific dance forms, choreography, improvisational scores, creative research, and time for artistic reflection and exchange.

Participants will be supported in creating and performing their own individual dance scores throughout the week. Working with time, place, available resources, and one another, you will be encouraged to enter deeply into your own creative process. Whether you identify primarily as a dancer, artist, maker, performer, or cultural worker, this residency invites you to engage creativity as a living practice of relationship.

After these individual journeys, we will turn our attention toward the creation of a collective ritual performance. Together, we will weave our discoveries into a shared offering and invite members of the local community to witness and participate.

Our work will culminate in a feast in which we feed the land, one another, and the community through performance, storytelling, celebration, and the sharing of food. In this way, the creative process becomes both artistic expression and an act of reciprocity.

We will be working both inside the studio and throughout the living landscape of Panya Forest.

Panya Forest will provide delicious meals grown and prepared from the abundance of the farm, as well as simple accommodations for participants throughout the residency.

This is a facilitator-held immersive process that asks for presence, maturity, and participation. It is not passive or consumptive; it is relational, experiential, and collaborative. Participants are invited to arrive with a willingness to tend their own process while contributing attentively to a shared field of respect, listening, creative responsibility, and cultural exchange.

About Nathan

Nathan’s passion is the deep interplay between nature and art. He works as a wilderness guide, dancer, cook, and caretaker of his homeland. A seasoned dancer, creator, and facilitator of ritual and artistic process, he brings 25 years of experience studying, performing, and teaching Butoh and improvisational dance. He serves as steward of the MESA (Movement and Ecology Sanctuary for Art) in Southwest Colorado.

 The MESA was born from family heritage and land preserved through a conservation trust. Since 2014, Nathan has invited participants to encounter both inner and outer wilderness through Butoh and Ritual Dance workshops. These experiences revealed deep relationships between land and self, emphasizing conservation not only of place but of the soul. The MESA has become a sanctuary for both land and the remembrance of human creative power.

 Recently, the MESA has expanded into a traveling project, engaging other landscapes as a kind of pilgrimage, while remaining rooted in its home in Southwest Colorado.

 In 1997, Nathan met Diego Piñon, beginning a lifelong study of Butoh and Ritual Dance. He later trained and performed in Japan with influential teachers including Kazuo and Yoshito Ohno, Natsu Nakajima, and Sankai Juku. He founded the Boulder International Butoh Festival, hosting and performing with first-generation masters.

 A pivotal encounter with Min Tanaka shaped Nathan’s understanding of Butoh as a living, communal practice grounded in everyday life—food, song, story, and the immediacy of dance.

 Nathan continues to cultivate Butoh as a relationship between life and art—an ongoing inquiry into how we meet life through the body and the forces of nature. He is the founder of Syzygy Butoh, with work presented internationally, and has taught at Prescott College, Naropa University, and numerous programs.

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