Flash: Butoh, hip-hop, and the urban body in crisis

Abstract

Sakamoto's contribution originated as a performative lecture about a dance theater duet. Much more than a cross-cultural exploration, Sakamoto's piece offers a poetic and philosophical glance at utopia. His essay proposes a deep reflection on how art, theory, and place coexist in concept and execution. The erasure of borders, political and artistic, finds a home in his practice as a performance artist who expresses a strong desire to rethink postindigenous bodies. By discussing concrete utopian artistic manifestations, he argues that Japanese butoh and hip-hop dance were both born of extreme conditions in the postwar boom era, and both art forms embraced chaos and contradiction, appropriating the markers of marginalization and decay while fashioning resistant aesthetic styles.