The fifth-annual Salish Sea Butoh Festival is bringing an international assortment of performing artists to Port Townsend to close out the summer.

Guest artists in this contemporary dance form will come from Japan, Australia, France and Mexico, as well as Austin, Texas, and Seattle. The festival is at Fort Worden State Park from Friday, Aug. 22, through Saturday, Aug. 23.

Iván Espinosa, executive producer of the Salish Sea Butoh organization, noted the irony that a number of people mistakenly assume butoh dance is a traditional and distinctly Japanese art form.

Espinosa explained that butoh is an avant-garde form of performance that emerged in late 1950s and early 1960s Tokyo and quickly became multicultural as it gained popularity around the world.

“It started in Japan, but spread beyond its borders,” Espinosa said. “There are butoh artists and dancers all over the world, a number of whom are not strictly connected to Japan.”

Choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata developed butoh at the height of the Japanese counterculture movement, after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, featuring performers covered head-to-toe in white body paint, contorting their bodies and facial expressions.

“Butoh’s founder was inspired not only by Japanese theater and Eastern spiritual thought, but by European literature, Western performance art, German Expressionism, French Existentialism, Dada and Surrealist artists ranging from Salvador Dalí to Francis Bacon,” Espinosa said. “Butoh was born out of a fusion of cultural influences. It’s a melting pot that’s transcended barriers to celebrate global diversity.”

Among the reasons Espinosa feels so personally connected to butoh is its foundational spirit of experimentation and innovation, which he credited with continually bringing new approaches to the art form, rather than dogmatically clinging to a fixed status quo.

“Once you learn butoh’s principles, you’re actually encouraged to incorporate your own influences,” Espinosa said. “It lends itself to uniquely creative, cutting-edge interpretations.”

Espinosa proudly touted Salish Sea Butoh as “the only organization consistently bringing international butoh artists to the Olympic Peninsula.”

Espinosa also pointed out how Salish Sea Butoh shares its region’s concerns with ecology.

“Our butoh festival is one of the few in the West to highlight humanity’s impacts on nature and the environment,” said Espinosa, who cited the influence of the Salish Sea Butoh Festival being staged in communities such as Port Townsend and the Quimper Peninsula. “Port Townsend is famous for its beautiful lands and waters. Fort Worden’s natural spaces range from beaches to forests. The Pacific Northwest is an iconic location in which to educate the public.”

A grant from the Port Townsend Arts Commission, makes the festival’s educational portion free to the public, with a week of evening lectures delivered by butoh historians and academic scholars from across the country.

That same week — which started on Saturday, Aug. 16, and leads up to the festival itself — is set to include daily butoh workshops, from mornings to evenings, as well as an evening butoh cabaret on Wednesday, Aug. 20.

“It’ll be a fusion of butoh with burlesque,” Espinosa said.

Espinosa described this year’s festival as highlighting master butoh artists of the art form’s first and second generations, along with third and fourth-generation butoh artists from all over the world, performing on the same stage of Fort Worden’s USO Hall theater.

“Butoh was born from the culture of socially turbulent times, which perhaps makes it as relevant as ever today,” Espinosa said.

What to know:

Tickets and a schedule of the Salish Sea Butoh Festival and its attendant events are available online.

All ticket purchases include admission to a post-show talk, for a chance to meet the artists.