A! - Yobusha- Dancing With Stones
Hof Menningarhús, Strandgata 12, 600 Akureyri Directions
Sat Oct 10 2026 15:00
Yubusha – Performance at Hof Culture House
How do we relate to stones, the land, and the spiritual world we share with nature?
Japanese artist collective Yubusha is developing a research project and new performance in Iceland exploring how people experience and form relationships with land, stones, and the spiritual world through the body.
The project draws on a comparison between the Japanese tradition of Sōmokutō – stone monuments created to commemorate plants and other living beings – and Icelandic folk beliefs surrounding spirits and hidden people, particularly their connections to stones and landscapes in and around Akureyri.
At the heart of the project is the idea of the “ritual body” – how belief, memory, and our relationship with nature are not only ideas, but something we experience and express through the body. Drawing on Butoh dance, Yubusha explores questions of life, death, and existence, using the body itself as a medium through which these relationships can be sensed and expressed.
The performance is part of Yubusha’s ongoing artistic research, where research and performance become intertwined. The group previously created Shokei: Summer, Sōmokutō, a work exploring the transience of life and mourning in relation to nature. In Iceland, Yubusha continues this research by developing a new work informed by fieldwork exploring the land, stones, and the stories and beliefs connected to them.
The project creates a dialogue between Japan and Iceland, bringing together the body, the land, and belief.
