The GHOST 5 – Festival of Butoh, Sound, and Vision brings together Butoh dancers, sound artists, and visual artists from Germany, France, Greece, and the United Kingdom to create an experimental, stimulating, and immersive landscape of experience for performers and audiences alike. In an age of acceleration and social isolation, the festival aims to open up spaces for deceleration, self-centering, and respectful coexistence. It asks: How can art help us accept ourselves, take responsibility, and find resonance in others? How can the self dissolve into the collective without losing itself? The performance courses at the last festival edition, GHOST 4 in 2024, were sold out on both evenings—the enthusiastic audience response demonstrates the growing interest in this unique fusion of Butoh, sound art, and visual art. The upcoming edition builds on this and invites you to experience the unfinished, the process-oriented, and the communal—and perhaps to recognize yourself in others in the process.

Walk-through installations provide the atmospheric backdrop for two performance courses, in which six Butoh dancers and five sound artists stage a poetic yet powerful exploration of questions of individual and collective responsibility. These festival highlights will take place on June 18 and 26, 2026. The performing artists have a day and a half to consolidate their ideas and develop a unique live improvisation within the installations. A wide variety of artistic styles and approaches thus enter into an intense, lively dialogue. The audience experiences firsthand how movement, sound, and space are constantly reshaped—unique, unpredictable, and shaped by mutual perception.

Mit Andreas Schmitten (DE/Bildende Kunst), Alisa Berger (DE/Bildende Kunst), Claude Hofer (CH/Bildende Kunst), Jörg Follert und David Yates alias Dolly Dolly & Fogroom (DE, UK/Sound), Kurt Dahlke alias Pyrolator (DE/Sound), Philipp Johann Thimm (DE/Sound), N (DE/Sound), Moeno Wakamatsu (FR/Tanz), Lucie Betz (DE/Tanz), Lisa Bless (DE/Tanz), Yuko Kaseki (DE/Tanz).
The “Spot On” performance featuring Susan El Hosri (Germany/dance) and Iphigenia Vogiatzaki (Greece/dance) will be part of the performance evening on June 26, 2026.

The goal of the project is to explore new artistic forms of introspection, intuition, and sensory perception by combining dance, sound art, and spatial installations. In addition, Butoh workshops open up these artistic processes to the wider community and encourage sustained engagement.