LUCÍA CALLÉN HERRERO

Lucía Callén holds a PhD in Biomedicine (Neurobiology) from the University of Barcelona (2012). She is also an actress-performer, choreographer, and stage director specializing in Physical Theater, buffoon, and butoh dance. She graduated from the Nouveau Colombier Mime School (2018) and the International Theater School of Arturo Bernal (2019). Lucía discovered butoh in 2015 through Jonathan Martineau and soon after co-founded Oracles Theater in Barcelona with Orland Verdú, blending butoh dance with physical theatre. She has trained with leading butoh masters such as Yumiko Yoshioka, Yuri Nagaoka, Mushimaru Fujieda, and Atsushi Takenouchi, studying at the JINEN Butoh School. She is a member of the international butoh company The Physical Poets, directed by Mushimaru Fujieda.

Since 2018, she has led La Sombras & Company, a multidisciplinary collective that integrates butoh dance, physical theatre, poetic voice, new technologies, and science to explore human nature in collaboration with international artists and scientists. “When I first encountered butoh, it felt like an instant recognition — as if I had always danced without knowing. For the first time, I saw my own unique and precious language. I chose to treasure it, nurture it, and learn how to share it with others.”

   

Through butoh, Lucía develops a distinctive language — a poetry of the flesh — exploring the unconscious through sensorial awakening and symbolic movement. Her work evokes dreamlike states in the audience by animating poetic imagery in the body. As Chantal Maillard wrote, “Infinity does not exist: infinity is the surprise of limits.” For Lucía, butoh is a way to explore that infinity — the spaces between sense and imagination, inner and outer worlds, dreams and reality. It is also a playground to awaken creativity, echoing the words of master Tatsumi Hijikata: “Butoh… plays with perspective. If we learn to see from the eyes of an animal, an insect, or even an inanimate object, the everyday road comes alive… everything is valuable.”

She has performed in numerous festivals across Europe and Asia (Spain, Italy, Austria, South Korea, Japan) and participated in various international residencies, including as a Goethe Institute fellow. Lucía is involved in several interdisciplinary and international collaborative projects:

• Space for Nature: a platform of artistist for exploring human-nature interaction through art.
• MolinoLab: an experimental space merging nature and interactive technology.
• Cadáver Exquisito: a national butoh collective organizing festivals and methodology exchanges (Suite de Butoh).
• Trarután Art and Nature:performer in site-specific works integrating art and nature, led by Nacho Arantegui.
• Synaptic Body: a collective she co-founded with Alec Ilyine and the Neurobioengineering Lab of UMH University (Elche), combining dance, live sound design, and real-time biometric feedback to craft immersive, interactive experiences.

As both a scientist and an artist, Lucía is committed to building bridges between art, science, and nature. Her work seeks to integrate butoh, theater, and neurobiology to deepen our understanding of the body-mind connection. She is currently developing an interdisciplinary methodology called Synaptic Butoh — aimed at awakening the creative soul through movement and expanding our sensory and perceptual experience of the living world. More at: www.synapticbody.com

Disciplines

Butoh Dance:

“The Dance of Darkness” (Ankoku Butoh) is a performative art form that emerged in the 1950s in Japan, created by masters Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno. It is a living art and a total theater that inhabits the indeterminate zones of the body, guiding the audience toward a cathartic experience where the language of the spirit — the Kotodama — is revealed.

Contemporary Buffoon and Pan(ic) Theater:

Deformity, marginality, and difference — precisely because of their power to provoke rejection — become potent tools for piercing the collective unconscious, breaking stereotypes, and proposing new forms of beauty and resistance. Through play, humor, and a deep connection with the audience, a shared performative space is created, capable of provoking revelation and collective catharsis.

Mask and Object Theater:

She explores the creation of characters and fantastical beings that open the doors to symbolic and dreamlike theater. Through them, a deep empathy is awakened with the emotions that reside in the non-human or the archetypal.

Burlesque, Pole and Exotic Dance

These disciplines are integrated as expressive tools aimed at rediscovering the erotic female body, scenic freedom, and performative empowerment through play, sensuality, and uninhibited expression.

Sound Creation:

It involves experimentation with live sound, field recordings, digital sound design, and biometric feedback as an expressive medium that enters into dialogue with the body on stage. Sound creation is not merely accompaniment, but rather another living, resonant body that amplifies the symbolic and sensorial world of the performance.