Violist. Butoh practitioner. Interdisciplinary artist. Dramaturg. Berlin.
What happens when music becomes a way of seeing rather than simply something to be heard?
A journey through memories, places and moments beyond linear time. A timeless figure wanders through different lives, carrying traces of each encounter.
Movement does not accompany the music, and the music does not accompany the movement. Sound, gesture and narrative unfold as one continuous process, built from original compositions developed through Butoh.
Nothing is composed in advance. Butoh is the method: physical states, gesture and facial expression push the sound into being as it happens.
Posted to social media, the sketches turned into a second experiment, on how a performing body is received. The responses so far:
All four are welcome. They show how much visual convention and the expectations placed on a performer's body shape what we think we hear.
A durational group ritual marking 67 years of Butoh. Shin's improvised viola was not accompaniment but a resonant body inside the collective performance field.
Musicians, performers and visual artists in intimate, immersive concert formats, made for audiences who want to experience music as more than listening.
A Room Within, viola and Butoh, Pandora Art Gallery, Berlin, 2026. Recent invitations include Berlin Art Week and artloft.berlin.
Heri Shin trained as a classical violist. Then she started letting her body decide what the viola says.
She studied at the Curtis Institute of Music and the Musikhochschule Lübeck, and played with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Deutsche Oper Berlin and Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, sharing the stage with Sir Simon Rattle, Yo-Yo Ma, Lang Lang, Michael Tilson Thomas and Marin Alsop.
Years in opera and theatre, where music lives next to movement, staging and the performer's physical presence, pushed her past the edges of sound. In Butoh she found the language for it. Combined with improvisation, it opened a space where music does not have to begin with a score, and where movement, sound and emotion shape one another in the moment.
She is co-founder and artistic director of Awen, an interdisciplinary cultural platform in Berlin, and founder of Beyond Stelle, a meetup for musicians looking past the orchestra job.