Yokko to Return for United Solo 2017 with HIDE YOUR FIRES

Yokko, the Japanese Butoh and theatre artist, returns United Solo this fall with her brand new show, Hide Your Fires, on Tuesday, Oct. 3 at 7:30 p.m. at Theatre Row-The Studio Theatre. Yokko has been appearing United Solo since 2013, and this is the 4th season of being the official selection of this festival.

United Solo, the world's largest solo theatre festival is in its 8th season at Theatre Row in New York City. United Solo featured nearly 800 theatre productions from all over the world. Yokko and her team have received several awards through their last work, Butoh Medea: (Best One-Woman Show, Best Choreography, Best lighting Design, Best Costume Design at United Solo 2014, Best Physical Theatre Show at United Solo 2015). Butoh Medea has been touring nationally and internationally since 2015. Meanwhile, the team has been developing the new show based on a story of Lady Macbeth, and presented Hide Your Fires -excerpt- at NU WORKS festival with Pan Asian Rep last April. Finally, it will premiere the full show at United Solo 2017.

Hide Your Fires brings the audience alongside the accursed spirit of Lady Macbeth to experience her nightmare of stifled ambition, unfulfilled desire, and ultimate loss. Telling the story solely through her perspective, this production fuses Japanese Butoh dance, movement, and various texts to take you inside the mind and body of one of Shakespeare's most famous villains. Director: Brian Rhinehart. Playwright: Sean Michael Welch. Costume Design: Deepsikha Chatterjee. Lighting Design: Derek Van Heel. Sound Design: Jorge Olivo with RGS. Movement Consultant: Jordan Rosin.

Yokko (Performer, Choreographer) is an actor, a movement and butoh artist, solo performer from Nagoya, Japan. She has acted in, devised and choreographed a variety of local and international shows, having won several awards, including "Best One-Woman Show" for Butoh Medea (United Solo 2014 at Theatre Row). Butoh Medea was selected to perform in Warsaw, Poland. (United Solo Europe 2015, Teatre Syrena), toured Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2015, nominated The Asian Arts Award. She has been invited to perform Butoh Medea at several Universities in USA, Atelier Teatro Fisico (Turin, Italy), and will be performing at MONOFEST'17 in Izmir, Turkey this September. Other Solo show: BALDY (CRS, United Solo 2013, HFF 2013, Fringe NYC 2012). Yokko also acted in several of local and international films, one of which is the Student Academy Winner film, Cloud-Kumo (2016). She is the associate artistic director of The Ume Group as well as the artistic director of Ren Gyo Soh in NYC. Winner of Best Physical Theatre Show, Best Choreography (Butoh Medea, United Solo 2015, 2014). B.A in Theatre (UAlbany), MFA in Acting (The Actors Studio). www.yokko-online.com

Brian Rhinehart (Director) is an actor, director, professor and Fulbright scholar. An expert in devised theatre and collaborative playmaking, he has worked as a freelance theatre director in Florida and New York for the last nineteen years. He is also a critically acclaimed actor, who has performed in over fifty productions in New York, Germany, and Florida. The plays he has written or co-written have been seen in The New York International Fringe Festival and a variety of Off-Off Broadway venues. brianrhinehart.info

Sean Michael Welch (Writer) was awarded the 1999 Kennedy Center / American College Theatre Festival John Cauble Short Play Award for Earl the Vampire, and won the 2000 KC/ACTF Region III Ten-Minute Play Competition for Charleston's Finger. Past productions of his work include Slab, Try Not to Step on the Naked Man,Rise Up You Bloody Animals, All an Act, Staged Reading, and Boise, Idaho. His published work includes Earl the Vampire (Samuel French, 2000), Boise, Idaho (Zoetrope: All-Story, 2000 and Playscripts, Inc., 2012), and Try Not to Step on the Naked Man (Zoetrope: All-Story, 2002). His play All An Act premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2012. His novel 1897: Aliens! Zombies! Vampires! was released in 2015.

Tickets for Hide Your Fires at United Solo are $35 (plus a $2.25 theatre restoration charge) and are available at the Theatre Row box office, telecharge.com, or by phone at (212) 239-6200.