ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on three particularly influential Japanese founders. The first of these is Ohno Kazuo, who toured Italy in 1983, and gave the first butoh workshop at Rome's "La Sapienza" University in 1986. The second is Iwana Masaki, who gave a series of extensive workshops in Rome starting with that of Theatre La Comunita in 1991. And the last is Kasai Akira, who gave his first workshop in Rome in 1998. Ohno's affinity with European cultural sensibilities as well as his age played a central role in the first diffusion of butoh. It was a real shock at the time to see an old man dancing. Capitalizing on their success in France, Sankai Juku and Tanaka were the first butoh performers to visit Italy. Moreover, the press took for granted the fact that butoh was related to the post Hiroshima landscape as pointed out by Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard.
