Hijikata situated butoh as an outlaw, literary, and
surrealist dance form, drawing on themes of death, criminality, abjection, and corporeality.
For example, his work Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church integrates post-modern
dance techniques and theories with «voguing,» a stylized
dance emerging from Black American drag culture originating in the Harlem ballrooms of the»80s; along with the Japanese
dance form «butoh,» a
surrealist, abject art that emerged as a refutation of conservative ideals in postwar Japan.