Butoh America : Butoh Dance in the United States and Mexico from 1970 to the early 2000s

Butoh America unearths the artists and networks that popularized butoh dance in the Americas, through a focused look at key producers and festivals in United States and Mexico.

Over the ensuing decades, highly-trained dancers and theater artists who were looking for innovative approaches to performance found their way to butoh training and wove butoh methods into their own genres, bringing butoh further into the mainstream.

Tanya Calamoneri 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.

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.