Music preservation efforts go beyond strictly archival functions. They challenge our understanding of certain genres that have been historically associated with just a few major cities. For individual musicians who have never profited from their work finally, preservation groups can also provide some small restitution...
Since the Dot-Com Boom of the 1990s, San Francisco, California, has left its hippie and counterculture roots behind to become the poster child for the affordability crisis. With that has come the slow exodus of its creative class, who, priced out, have been forced to...
"[The] purpose of my glitch art isn't to destroy my photographs, but to expose the mechanisms beneath the surface, to turn an image inside out and expose its entrails, to invite viewers to immerse themselves in this seemingly undecipherable space, to find reconstituted forms, the...
Kazuo Ohno © H. Tsukamoto
Dance is a corporeal poetry that speaks to us through sensual body memory and intangible thought, thus communicating experience and expressing ideals. We may, for instance, find the most exquisite aspirations to perfection in the sculptural forms of ballet and the etiquettes of ballroom dance -- but what dance is there to speak of anguish and terror? What of the uncontainable spirit that seeps from our grotesque beings in spite of vigilant taboo? Would it not be deceptive to express the most visceral of human experience through only forms of chiseled beauty?
Dance that declares itself as an encompassing language for human experience yet speaks from under a veneer of piety for conventional aesthetics is fundamentally dishonest. With passionate protest to the void in integrity of expression and against standards of superficiality, Butoh emerged at the end of the 20th century.
It was in the shadow of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that Butoh's first breaths were drawn, already shuddering naked and borne by true darkness. Shaped into its ghostly form by dancers Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata, Butoh came to define Japanese avant-garde dance in its embrace of the totality of emotional experience and the absurdity found in the raw body. Ohno and Hijikata composed a new lyric for the human body where nothing was forbidden to experience. The revolutionary spirit of Butoh explored morbidity and sexuality in its most explicit forms. By doing so, it not only transformed the Japanese stage but connected with international audiences and dancers, tantalizing a universal desire for this same purity of expression. Until the '60s, there had been no such dance within Japan that allowed for the communication of the uninhibited body and, as far as technical form, there still exist few such parallels.
"We're not just trying to give people a place to go and dance and listen to music. Instead, we're trying to inspire people to gather, celebrate and learn in a responsible and healthy way so they can inspire change in the world when they...
Alash River, Tuva Republic. Photography by Konstantin Mikhailov
