Coney Island Ritual Cabaret

(2016, 2017, 2018)

International Culture Lab, with Diego Pinon

With his own distinctive approach to sacred entertainment is Mexican master teacher Diego Piñón’s Body Ritual Movement (BRM). Though his intensives and ensemble performances at Coney Island USA, Piñón invented the term “ritual cabaret” as the defining aesthetic that resulted from his immersion into the historical and contemporary Coney Island.

The history of the Coney Island Ritual Cabaret Festival is informed by dancer/choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata who in the 1950’s originated butoh with his ensemble of burlesque dancers in an effort to defy and subvert authority, including conventional notions of dance, thereby seeking transformation – on the personal, societal and political level.