An Empty Room is a transformative journey through butoh, an avant-garde form of performance art that originated in Japan in the late 1950's and is now a global phenomenon. This is the first book about butoh authored by a scholar-practitioner who combines personal experience with ethnographic and historical accounts alongside over twenty photos. Author Michael Sakamoto traverses butoh dance history from its roots in post-World War II Japan to its diaspora in the West in the 1970s and 1980s. An Empty Room delves into the archive of butoh dance, gathering testimony from multiple generations of artists active in Japan, the US, and Europe. The book also creatively highlights seminal visual and written texts, especially Hosoe Eikoh's photo essay, "Kamaitachi," and Hijikata Tatsumi's early essays. Sakamoto ultimately fashions an original view of what butoh has been, is and, more importantly, can be through the lens of literary criticism, photo studies, folklore, political theory, and his experience performing, photographing, teaching, and lecturing in 15 countries worldwide.
""The text digs deeply into butoh based philosophy and its application to bodily research, an approach largely absent from other English-language butoh scholarship.""
Megan V. Nicely
"An Empty Room thus offers a glimpse into Sakamoto's journey and a view into the elusive subculture of butoh, with an eye towards butoh's potential for social change... as his research continues to evolve, Sakamoto makes clear that his text asks more questions than it answers, questions he invites other artist scholars to adopt."
