Meshi Chavez

Meshi Chavez is a queer dance maker, choreographer, and movement facilitator whose work centers embodiment, relationality, and collective presence. His practice develops methods for fully inhabiting the body, cultivating sensitivity, attention, and curiosity as pathways toward deeper engagement with the world. As a community builder, he brings people together through movement to experience embodiment in relation, working on the premise that all aspects of existence are interconnected and animated by a larger, universal body.

Butoh is Chavez’s primary dance and performance practice, encompassing both choreography and improvisation. Emerging in Japan in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Butoh resists fixed form and dominant Western aesthetics, revealing dance’s unfixed and transformational nature. It values presence, spaciousness, and stillness alongside movement. Chavez has studied Butoh for over twenty years with Denise Fujiwara and our master teacher, Natsu Nakajima, the first female Butoh dancer and choreographer, and is among a small number of Butoh teachers in North America.

Chavez is third-generation American by blood, Mexican, and Spanish, and was ceremonially adopted into Lakota Sioux traditions in his early twenties. His long-term participation in ceremonial dance informs his understanding of movement, creativity, and life, and his artistic work emerges as a translation of an ongoing relationship with the unseen. Through dance, he sheds conventional ideas of what movement should be, orienting instead toward what it is becoming, while cultivating curiosity, care, and presence.

Chavez is currently based at Middlebury College, where he has taught since 2021. He holds an MFA from the University of the Arts and has over two decades of experience teaching, performing, and creating work nationally and internationally. He teaches Butoh, choreography, and Movement as Meditation, and is the co-founder of Momentum Conscious Movement.

Chavez’s scholarship is grounded in embodied research that understands dance as a communal, accessible, and transformative practice rather than an elite or exclusionary form. His work investigates movement as shared knowledge-making, foregrounding access and participation as ethical commitments, particularly for those historically distanced from dance by institutional, economic, or cultural barriers. Drawing from Butoh, somatic practice, and Indigenous and contemplative lineages, he examines fascia, breath, gravity, and relational space as primary substances of connection and interrelatedness.

Central to his research is an inquiry into mysticism, meditation, and movement as intertwined practices, examining how dance functions both as performance and as a means of cultivating attention, ethical presence, and collective attunement. Chavez positions the moving body as both archive and oracle, capable of transmitting knowledge that exceeds language and recalls Indigenous knowledge systems and pedagogical practices carried through embodied, relational, and ceremonial ways of knowing. Through teaching, creative practice, and writing, his scholarship proposes alternative pedagogical models rooted in listening, curiosity, and care, contributing to dance and performance studies, somatic pedagogy, and interdisciplinary conversations on embodiment, community, and creative freedom.