BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Department of Art and Art History will present a free butoh performance and lecture by Deborah Mauldin, president of the American Dance Guild and master butoh artist. “Butoh - A Post-Modern Japanese Dance: Performance & Talk by Deborah Mauldin,” is planned for 6:30 p.m. Thursday, April 5, in the Alys Stephens Center's Odess Theatre, 1200 10th Ave. S. Admission is free and open to the public. Call 205-934-4205 for more information. The event is part of the Jemison Lecture Series.

“This is a rare opportunity for UAB students and members of the Birmingham public to see and learn about a compelling and innovative modern Japanese art form,” said UAB professor of art history Cathleen Cummings, Ph.D. “The event should be of special appeal to students of art, theater, music and history.”

In addition to the performance of three butoh works, Mauldin will discuss “The Exoneration of Henry Walker Byrd,” an original butoh video piece based upon an alleged incident that took place in Harpersville, Ala., in the 1920s or 1930s: the lynching of an African-American man, a migrant cotton-field worker who had befriended a white girl and was wrongly condemned for the death of that girl. Mauldin’s performance, filmed “on location” at a Harpersville cotton field cabin, explores the racism and segregation that forms a part of Alabama’s history.

Butoh has been called shocking, provocative, spiritual, erotic, grotesque, violent, cosmic, nihilistic and cathartic. Born of the 1950s avant-garde and Fluxus movements, butoh was a resistance to the general establishment and to a rigid social system. Not everyone considers it a dance form, Cummings said.

“For many people it is a strange kind of theater. The best thing is to describe it as a mixture of elements of traditional Japanese theatre, Ausdrucktanz and mime. It breaks with the established dance rules and leaves much room for improvisation,” she said. “Characteristics one often sees are the white painted bodies, the slow movements, the bald heads and contorted postures. The dance evokes images of decay, of fear and desperation, eroticism, ecstasy and stillness.

“The birth of this extraordinary dance lies in post-war Japan. To be precise, the performance of ‘Kinjiki’ in 1959,” Cummings said. “Kinjiki,” or “Forbidden Colors,” was the title of a performance by Tatsumi Hijikata, which provoked a major scandal at the 1959 Tokyo Dance Festival and launched Ankoku Butoh, or dance of darkness, a radical answer to Western concepts of dance, a Japanese “rebellion of the body.” Hijikata introduced the word Ankoku Butoh, later abbreviated to butoh.

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The UAB Department of Art and Art History presents "Butoh - A Post-Modern Japanese Dance: Performance & Talk by Deborah Mauldin," (pictured) at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, April 5, in the UAB Mary Culp Hulsey Recital Hall, 950 13th St. S. Admission is free and open to the public. Call 205-934-4205 for more information.