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

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.

Tanya Calamoneri is a dancer, choreographer, and an Assistant Professor of Dance at Texas Tech University. Her primary area of research is Butoh dance. She also writes about issues concerning the migration of forms across cultural boundaries in a globalized world. Her writing has been published in Routledge’s Theatre, Dance and Performance Training Journal, Dance Chronicle, Journal of Dance Education, and Movement Research Journal, as well as a chapter on Butoh pedagogy in the Routledge Butoh Companion and a chapter in Routledge’s Intercultural Actor and Performer Training.