Salem State’s Center for Creative and Performing Arts (CCPA) presents IzumonookunI, Friday, September 15 at 7:30 pm in the Sophia Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts, 356 Lafayette Street. The performance will be followed by a Q and A with the creators.

IzumonookunI is a multi-media, multidisciplinary dance inspired by Izumo no Okuni, 17th century cis-female founder of the Japanese dance-drama form, kabuki—a form that currently contains little trace of its cis-femalecentric, grassroots, counter-cultural origins. Choreographer Aretha Aoki and Bessie-nominated sound designer and artist Ryan MacDonald are resurrecting and re-imagining Okuni as a punk/synthwave/glam-goth figure. IzumokookunI aims to reclaim the origins of kabuki, collapse reductive binaries, and allow audiences to make new connections between seemingly disparate forms.