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