Butoh America: Butoh Dance in the United States and Mexico from 1970 to the early 2000s (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)

Butoh America unearths the people and networks that popularized Butoh dance in the Americas through a focused look at key artists, producers, and festivals in the United States and Mexico. This is the first book to gather these histories into one narrative and look at the development of American Butoh. From its inception in San Francisco in 1976, American Butoh aligned with avant-garde performance art in alternative venues such as galleries and experimental theaters. La MaMa in New York and the Festival Internacional Cervantino in Guanajuato both served to legitimize the form as esteemed experimental performance. A crystallizing moment in each of the three locations―San Francisco, New York, and Mexico City―has been a grand-scale festival featuring prominent Japanese and numerous other international artists, as well as fostering local communities. This book stitches together the flow of people and ideas, highlights the connections in the Butoh diaspora, and incorporates interviewee perspectives regarding future directions for the genre in the Americas. "American Anchor Artists and Festivals" highlights three key artists: Maureen Fleming, Joan Laage, and Diego Piñón. All have spent numerous years in Japan and worked with the Ohnos, and two have worked with Min Tanaka. Their teaching and performance is the foundation of American butoh. Additionally, Brechin Flournoy launched the San Francisco Butoh Festival launched in 1993, the first major American festival dedicated to butoh, which developed student communities, educated critics and audiences, and cultivated the funding community to support butoh in the Americas Cover Half Title Series Title Copyright Dedication Contents List of Figures A Note About Spanish and Japanese Names and Words Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations 1 Introduction 2 Stranger in a Strange Land: 1970s Avant-Garde as Precursor to Butoh 3 American Anchor Artists and Festivals 4 Gen X Butoh 5 The Future of Butoh Is . . . Index Min Tanaka, American butoh artists, Cultural Studies, experimental art, Kazuo Ohno, Shuji Terayama, Theatre