Art Happens

Since 2013 Trajal Harrell has been looking closely at Japanese butoh dance and its founder Tatsumi Hijikata to develop works that combine a speculative remapping of the history of contemporary dance and composition.  In Sister or He Buried the Body, he combines theoretical ideas from voguing with formal ideas deriving from Butoh dance.

Harrell’s solo performance advances many of his long-standing artistic discourses while delving deeper into Hijikata’s legacy, his speculative associations with African-American choreographer Katherine Dunham and her seminal research on Haitian Vodou, the death of Hijikata’s sister, and his attempt to archive her dead body in his own performance. Hijikata shared a studio with Dunham before he made his first butoh piece, leading to Harrell’s speculation that Dunham could be, in his words, “the long-lost mother of butoh.”