talk + performanceThe heretical body. Butō dance from birth to todayQuantum Activism

The first Japanese dancers who arrived in Europe shocked audiences with a physicality that did not correspond to any known genre.

In the 1970s, butō developed into a real genre and companies and solo dancers started to spread. Tatsumi Hijikata’s work aims at group choreography by developing a method that uses words to ‘make images physical’. Once it reached Europe, the seduction of butō turned into curiosity and fuelled a demand for teaching that produced stable and long-lasting experiences, mainly in France, Italy and Germany.

On the occasion of the exhibition TOKYO REVISITED, by Daido Moriyama with Shomei Tomatsu, MAXXI presents Il corpo eretico, three appointments designed to recount the transformations of butō dance from its origins to the present day. These are accompanied by live performances by Japanese and Italian dancers in the museum spaces.
The cycle starts in the 1960s, when a community of artists literally took to the streets inventing new languages destined to change the official narrative of the country and leave a lasting trace. Tokyo becomes both a performance space and the disturbing double of an unstoppable human mutation. Physicality is the trait that unites the experiments of the avant-garde and revolutionises all representative codes, in a climate of exchange and collaboration between dance, photography, cinema, painting, design and literature. It is a dense, anarchic, erotic corporality, disobedient to all rules, and is nourished by the radical explorations of Tatsumi Hijikata, the founder of butō dance.

speaker
Maria Pia D’Orazi journalist and theatre historian
performance
Across by and with Flavio Arcangeli, Melissa Lohman
World’s End Underground by and with Kentaro Kujirai, Makoto Sadakata, Izumi Noguchi (Corvus Company)

individual seats reserved for myMAXXI cardholders by writing to mymaxxi@fondazionemaxxi.it, by the day before the event