Trajal Harrell is considered one of the most important choreographers working in contemporary dance today. In Sister or he buried the body, Harrell combines vogueing – a modern dance style developed in the late 1980s from the Harlem ballroom scene – with formal and gestural ideas derived from Butō dance, which originated in Japan in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Weaving links between two seemingly distant cultures, the artist puts the body at the centre of his research, exploring the ways in which it becomes a receptacle of memory, the past and historical characters who have inspired this work. Intertwining notions of time, history and transcultural references, it reveals the multitude of layers that make up the richness of history of contemporary dance.