Catch a performance by the Japanese Sankai Juku dance company on September 20 at the Metropolitan Theater in Medellin.
Sankai Juku, a movement in Butoh dance, was founded by Amagatsu Ushio in 1975, according to event website Plan B.
It is considered the second wave in Butoh dance, which originally emerged in Japan following World War II. The dance drew its inspiration from the disgusted reaction of many Japanese to the burned and mutilated survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings.
Butoh dance often focuses on what usually compels us to look away: the intensely grotesque, perverse or taboo.
Sankai Juku, Amagatsu’s second-generation Butoh dance troupe, means “studio by the mountain and sea.” The all-male company uses body language to express Amagatsu’s take on the universality of the human experience, from serenity to brutality.