{"id":39622,"date":"2016-04-15T14:26:50","date_gmt":"2016-04-15T19:26:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/news.medill.northwestern.edu\/chicago\/?p=39622"},"modified":"2016-04-15T12:26:28","modified_gmt":"2016-04-15T17:26:28","slug":"flash-an-intercultural-conversation-between-butoh-and-hip-hop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.medill.northwestern.edu\/chicago\/flash-an-intercultural-conversation-between-butoh-and-hip-hop\/","title":{"rendered":"Flash: An intercultural conversation between Butoh and Hip-Hop"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Vishakha Darbha<\/strong><\/p>\n

Interdisciplinary artist Michael Sakamoto is one half of Flash, a Butoh\/Hip-Hop duet performed with street-dance choreographer Rennie Harris. The\u00a0show, which\u00a0played\u00a0at Columbia College Dance Theatre earlier this month,\u00a0examines the body as a state of crisis.<\/p>\n

But for Sakamoto and Harris, Flash is also a public conversation between Butoh and Hip-Hop, and between their respective Japanese-American and African-American identities.<\/p>\n

[vimeo 161993096 w=474]<\/p>\n

In this video, Michael Sakamoto narrates his journey from greenroom to stage, as he explains the importance of intercultural conversations.<\/div>\n

Butoh is a form of Japanese dance theater that emerged after\u00a0World War II, primarily through the efforts of Hijikata Tatsumi. It evolved as a rejection of mainstream 1950s Japanese society and was part of a growth of a more avant-garde expression. The dance focuses on the body, depicting various emotional expressions, often contradictory, that make up the human spirit, such as terror and desire.<\/p>\n

Sakamoto has been creating his own art for about 18 years. He says\u00a0it plays between external and internal elements like\u00a0the body and the image, the perceived and the projected.<\/p>\n

Apart from Butoh, he is also a performance studies, dance studies and cultural studies scholar and a full-time professor at the University of Iowa.<\/p>\n

Michael Sakamoto and Rennie Harris perform ‘Flash’, a dance theater that is conceived as a ‘conversation’ between Sakamoto’s Japanese American and Harris’ African-American approach to exhibiting a body in crisis. (Vishakha Darbha\/MEDILL)<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Vishakha Darbha Interdisciplinary artist Michael Sakamoto is one half of Flash, a Butoh\/Hip-Hop duet performed with street-dance choreographer Rennie Harris. The\u00a0show, which\u00a0played\u00a0at Columbia College Dance Theatre earlier this month,\u00a0examines the body as a state of crisis. But for Sakamoto and Harris, Flash is also a public conversation between Butoh and Hip-Hop, and between their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":238,"featured_media":39733,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194,2582],"tags":[2559,891,886,1629,192],"class_list":["post-39622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-culture","category-spring-2016","tag-butoh","tag-dance","tag-hip-hop","tag-japanese-american","tag-promo"],"yoast_head":"\nFlash: An intercultural conversation between Butoh and Hip-Hop - Medill Reports Chicago<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/news.medill.northwestern.edu\/chicago\/flash-an-intercultural-conversation-between-butoh-and-hip-hop\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Flash: An intercultural conversation between Butoh and Hip-Hop - Medill Reports Chicago\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"By Vishakha Darbha Interdisciplinary artist Michael Sakamoto is one half of Flash, a Butoh\/Hip-Hop duet performed with street-dance choreographer Rennie Harris. 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