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Salem State Arts Opens Season with IzumonookunI

Admission free for Salem residents
Sep 12, 2023

Salem State’s Center for Creative and Performing Arts (CCPA) opens it fall season with IzumonookunI, Friday, September 15 at 7:30 pm in the Sophia Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts, 356 Lafayette Street.

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.

Reserve a ticket.

$15 for general admission, $10 for seniors, and free for students (with student ID) and under 18. This performance is a Salem Night with free admission for Salem residents with ID.

Additional highlights of CCPA’s fall programming include: The Ghost Sonata by August Strindberg, a North Indian Classical Music Concert with Kunal Gunjal and Aditya Kalyanpur, an evening with author Tiphanie Yanique, and an exhibition by artist Keith Knight. 

View the full calendar. 

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