An Empty Room: Imagining Butoh and the Social Body in Crisis

Sakamoto, Michael

ISBN 10: 0819580643 / ISBN 13: 9780819580641

Published by Wesleyan University Press, 2022

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: An Empty Room: Imagining Butoh and the Social Body in Crisis
• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Publication Date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0819580643
• ISBN 13: 9780819580641
• Binding: hardcover
• Condition: New
• Book Type: book

About this title

Synopsis

Reinterpreting butoh's history to reimagine its future

Short Listed for The de la Torre Bueno© First Book Award (2023)


An Empty Room is a transformative journey through butoh, an avant-garde form of performance art that originated in Japan in the late 1950's and is now a global phenomenon. This is the first book about butoh authored by a scholar-practitioner who combines personal experience with ethnographic and historical accounts alongside over twenty photos. Author Michael Sakamoto traverses butoh dance history from its roots in post-World War II Japan to its diaspora in the West in the 1970s and 1980s. An Empty Room delves into the archive of butoh dance, gathering testimony from multiple generations of artists active in Japan, the US, and Europe. The book also creatively highlights seminal visual and written texts, especially Hosoe Eikoh's photo essay, "Kamaitachi," and Hijikata Tatsumi's early essays. Sakamoto ultimately fashions an original view of what butoh has been, is and, more importantly, can be through the lens of literary criticism, photo studies, folklore, political theory, and his experience performing, photographing, teaching, and lecturing in 15 countries worldwide.

About the Author

MICHAEL SAKAMOTO (Amherst, MA) is an internationally recognized butoh and dance theater artist and Performing Arts Curator and Director of the Asian and Asian American Arts and Culture Program at the UMass Fine Arts Center.