The School for Contemporary Dance & Thought, INC

SCDT will host a residency, public workshops/artist talks and present Aretha Aoki/ Ryann McDonnald's : IzumonookunI on Nov 10-13, 2022. Along side the performance, 2 workshops will be offered including a teen making workshop, a compositional techniques workshop for professionals and an artist talk for the general public with Aretha and Ryann

IzumonookunI is a dance inspired by Izumo no Okuni, founder of the Japanese dance-drama form, Kabuki—a form that currently contains little trace of it’s female-centric, grassroots origins. Choreographer Aretha Aoki and sound and visual designer Ryan MacDonald are re-imagining Okuni as a punk rock/sci-fi figure in a landscape of built objects, digital design and live synthesizer. The piece touches on the tensions between erasure and hyper visibility, Douglas Hofstader’s concept of “strange loops”, cyclic forms that evade their hierarchical and linear-seeming progressions.