Vangeline Theater, home of New York Butoh Institute, will present Shahryar Shahamat’s Brave Prince in association with The Brick at Brick Aux Studio, 628 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn, NY, 11211 from March 26-29, 2026 at 7PM. The show runs 40 minutes. Tickets start at $20 and can be purchased here.
Brave Prince reflects the body under pressure, a body silenced, watched, heavy with memory, yet still quietly resisting. Inspired by figurative sculpture, the movement feels as though it has been carved from endurance itself. Rather than telling a linear story, the performance invites the audience to witness a body that remembers, perseveres, and transforms.
Brave Prince is about courage that grows in silence and about the quiet decision not to surrender.
Brave Prince is a Butoh performance accompanied by a display of paintings by artist Shahryar Shahamat. Karie Laks serves as technical director.
Shahryar Shahamat is a multidisciplinary artist and painter, born and raised in Tehran, Iran, and based in New York City since 2010. His ongoing visual project, Human on Human, explores human expression through abstract figurative forms inspired by personal history and lived experience. Rooted in repetition, intuition, and layered emotion, Shahryar’s work captures the complexity of the human condition through raw gesture, textured surfaces, and imaginative forms.
Since 2025, Shahryar has been studying Butoh under the mentorship of Vangeline at the New York Butoh Institute, which also marked the start of their artistic collaboration. His deepening engagement with Butoh has brought new dimensions to his artistic practice, fusing movement and visual art into embodied meditations on memory, vulnerability, and transformation.
His recent Butoh performance of Human on Human at the Queer Butoh Festival 2025 was praised for its “radical stillness” and powerful visual impact. Writing for thINKingDANCE, Jen George described his presence as “an easy point of focus for an impatient eye,” highlighting the resonant calm of his onstage presence amidst a landscape of slowness and poetic minimalism.
Through Butoh, Shahryar continues to expand his interdisciplinary language, offering audiences an intimate and poignant window into the shifting terrain of identity and the body. www.shahryarshahamat.com
Founded in 2002, The Brick has established itself as an essential experimental venue for the production of compelling, new, high-quality work. As a vital part of the New York artistic community, we present 250-300 live performances per year at our two spaces, The Brick and Brick Aux, and welcome over 10,000 audience members each year.
The Brick enters its third decade with a bold new vision and an abiding belief in the power of art. With a renewed focus on multi-week theatrical runs and a dynamic line-up of singular one-off events, The Brick is Williamsburg’s primary incubator of innovative theater and performing arts. bricktheater.com
Vangeline Theater is a New York–based butoh dance company and the home of the New York Butoh Institute, a leading center for butoh education, performance, research, and archiving. The organization is dedicated to advancing butoh in the 21st century while honoring its historical, social, and cultural roots.Vangeline Theater/ New York Butoh Institute engages local and international communities through public classes, workshops, festivals, and collaborations with renowned butoh artists. Its work foregrounds social justice, gender equity, and LGBTQI visibility, including the annual New York Butoh Institute Festival and Queer Butoh. Its award-winning Dream a Dream Project brings butoh dance to incarcerated populations across New York State, contributing to rehabilitation and creative empowerment. All programming is inclusive, accessible, and trauma-informed, reflecting a deep commitment to equity, diversity, and anti-oppressive practice.
Brave Prince is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and the support of Vangeline Theater/New York Butoh Institute.