Vanessa Skantze begins the practice of butoh dance in 2002 shortly after she cofounded the improvisational music/dance ensemble Death Posture in New Orleans. Following many years of writing and performing spoken word, performance works and physical theater, she dove into the pure language of the body and the power of the butoh imagery to transcend personal and human limitations. Throughout Death Posture's New Orleans time and subsequently in Seattle -- where she arrived in 2004 with her dance partner Alex Ruhe -- Vanessa has constantly worked with experimental musicians in performances. Now called Danse Perdue (lost dance), Vanessa and Alex create works as intimate collaborations between bodies and sound, whether structured group performance or solo/duo improvisations. She brings over ten years of Ashtanga/Hatha yoga teaching experience, lending her butoh classes a deep body specificity and technique in which to ground butoh imagery. Vanessa and Alex hace trained and performed with Jinen Butoh founder Atsushi Takenouchi since 2003.

Alex Ruhe is the co-director of the performance group Danse Perdue and the Teatro de la Psychomachia, a small private theater and gallery in SoDo, Seattle. He has performed (ritual theater, butoh dance, text) and shown artwork (metal sculpture, oils, photography) in many venues in the states and in Europe, sometimes in conjunction with his teaches, Atsushi Takenouchi, Hiroko Komiya.

A fan of Butoh since 1977, Kaoru Okumura studied Butoh in 1993 at Asbestos-Kan in Tokyo with Akiko Motofuji, Hijikata's wife, and also had her first performance there. After another long interval, she encountered Seattle Butoh dancers in 2008, which kindled her dream of sharing her own art. Since then, she has enjoyed working and performing with Danse Perdue, where she experiences how a body bridges the soul and the world. Her unique background balances computer technology and the arts; she has an MS degree in mathematical logics, and a career as researcher, developer, and program manager in computer companies with a specialty in natural languages analysis. She also enjoys contributing to the Butoh community as a photographer, and video artist.