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.
Table of Contents:
- Chapter 1: Introduction
- Chapter 2: Stranger in a Strange Land: 1970s Avant-Garde as Precursor to Butoh
- Alejandra Jodorowsky, Abraham Oceransky, Terayama Shuji, Ellen Stewart/LaMaMa Experimental Theater Club, Koichi Tamano, Byakko Sha in Mexico
- Chapter 3: American Anchor Artists and Festivals (Open Access)
- Maureen Fleming, Joan Laage, Diego Pinon, Brechin Flournoy/The San Francisco Butoh Festival
- Chapter 4: Gen X Butoh
- Espartaco Martinez, Eugenia Vargas, Cuerpos en Revuelta Mexican Butoh Festival, Shinichi Iova-Koga/inkBoat, Degenerate Art Ensemble/Crow Haruko Nishimura and Joshua Kohl, Leimay/Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya, The New York Butoh Festival
- Chapter 5: The Future of Butoh is …
- Vangeline/The New York Butoh Institute, Tania Galindo/Butoh Chilango
Review of Butoh America by Mariko Miyagawa. 2023. “A History of Butô Butoh America: Butoh Dance in the United States and Mexico from 1970 to the Early 2000s.” English Journal of JSTR 3 (1): 87–90.
“Butoh America: Butoh Dance in the United States and Mexico from 1970 to the early 2000s will astonish Japanese butoh lovers and researchers because it shows that such a huge number of butoh practices were/are in the US and Mexico, but also sometimes expanding its scope to Canada, Chile, and Argentina….this is a well-conceived book which describe its current state in America.”
Additional selected butoh scholarship
Calamoneri, Tanya. “Butoh Practice in Historical and Contemporary Practice” in Baird, Bruce, and Rosemary Candelario, eds. 2019. The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group.
Calamoneri, Tanya. “Dancing Hamlet in a World of Frogs” in Zarrilli, Phillip B., T. Sasitharan, and Anuradha Kapur, eds. 2019. Intercultural Acting and Performer Training. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
Calamoneri, Tanya. 2015. “Butoh in San Francisco and New York” in Buto. Latvia: Apgāds Mansards.
Photo Credits (from Left to Right, Top to Bottom):
Kinji Hayashi in West (2003), duet with paige starling sorvillo, photo by Ian Winters
Espartaco Martinez and Kumotaro Mukai in Hajimemashite (2008), photo by Cesar Alberto Guzman
Eugenia Vargas in Umbria (2019), photo by Cesar Alberto Guzman
Tania Galindo in La tierra es cruda y sin embargo se mueve (2018), photo courtesy Tania Galindo