Erie Street Cemetery: An Invitation

Erie Street Cemetery: An Invitation by The Birds Who Walk at Night is a site-specific Butoh dance performance that invites you to visit Erie Street Cemetery. The city’s oldest cemetery offers a sacred space of peace and calm within the hustle and bustle of downtown Cleveland. This 60-minute meditative dance inspires quiet contemplation. Take a stroll through the beautiful, historic cemetery to enjoy this durational performance, or stay a while and take in the quiet calm for as long as you like.

The Birds Who Walk at Night Butoh Collective are a group of women in Northeast Ohio brought together by their love of movement, singing, and creating together. They offer site-specific, process-based performance experiences of Butoh dance and healing sound.

Butoh, “the dance of darkness” is a form of modern dance theater created in Japan in the 1950’s by founding artists Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno. Butoh is often characterized by grotesque forms, haunting imagery and otherworldly movements. This dance allows the performer, and the audience, to explore the human condition—including grief, trauma, and awareness of mortality. Although the dance explores dark themes, it can also illuminate beauty, tenderness, and the wonder of being a human — a creature of the earth.