GUSTAVO THOMAS (BUTOH PERFORMER)
Butoh artist, performing arts researcher, playwright and poet.
First an actor, he studied at Antonio González Caballero’s acting workshop mastering Gonzalez Caballero’s acting method, and has dedicated himself for more than 25 years to promote the work of that method through courses, articles and a book that collects the whole structure of the method as a valuable document for future generations of actors.
He has developed himself as a multidisciplinary artist in theater, as an actor, playwright, stage director and performing arts researcher. He has studied, worked and collaborated in dozens of schools, workshops and work-studies, as well as participated with different theater companies, focusing his acting work towards a theater linked to the method of González Caballero, to the explorations of Theater Anthropology, and to the different exploratory stages done by Jerzy Grotowski. His drama texts have been performed, published and read in different parts of the country. He was director of the theatre company Esférica Ludens from 1997 to 2002 with 5 productions under his belt.
In 2003, in a personal crisis and disappointed with the options offered by the theatrical life of the country, he left Mexico to start a trip around the world and recognize other theatrical cultures, teachers and means of expression, living in Lebanon (2003-2005 ), in China (2005-2009), Canada (2009-2014) and China again, this time in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, visiting more than 170 cities on 4 continents.
In 2009 he ventures into digital art and photography participating in a collective exhibition in New York, with a picture of him as the emblem of the exhibition on performing arts in Bali at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum in 2010, as well as collaborating with his images in different magazines (Able Muse, 2014) and in different internet sites.
Since 2010 he has been studying and working creatively with Butoh. His studies and practices have taken him to Toronto, Montréal, New York, Yokohama and Tokyo, working with masters such as Denise Fujiwara, Jocelyne Montpetit, Seisaku, Ko Murobushi, Natsu Nakajima and Yoshito Ohno, son of one of the two founders of Butoh, Kazuo Ohno, and whom Gustavo considers his most influential teacher due to the primordial interest he has in the so-called "Butoh of light", an open encounter with the spiritual forces of the artist through the impulsive movement and the free use of internal images.
Gustavo has presented his work of Butoh in Spain, Japan, Lebanon, Mexico and China, always in close collaboration with visual artists and musicians.
His Butoh he considers it not a show of performing skills in itself, but an encounter and a sharing of his creative and personal life with the spectator and with other artists on the scene through the impulsive and spiritual movement of his own being.
Masks is a work especially created for GOA 2019 festival: wearing masks is always a permission to feel the other, that of the others and that other of our own self.