Artistic Utopias: Michio Ito and the Trope of the International

Abstract

Michio Ito is often referred to as both an ‘international artist’ and ‘the forgotten pioneer’ in the canon of US modern dance. The coupling of these titles speaks to the multi-faceted contradictions found in the narration of his career by dance critics and historians. This chapter analyzes the political tensions of ‘forgetting’ Ito by revisiting narrations of his career in relationship to racialized understandings of the category — ‘international artist’ — in order to understand why Ito the ‘international’ must remain remembered as ‘forgotten’ within canonical narratives of early modern dance in the United States. Ito’s status as an ‘international artist’ — a carefully honed, racially ambiguous, subjectivity — is disrupted upon the bombing of Pearl Harbor and US entry into World War II when subject to legal discourse (Executive Order 9066). His racially marked Japanese body becomes irreconcilable with an American modern dance history dependent upon narratives of US nationalism as a formative and productive means to achieve recognition for modern dance.