Akim Funk Buddha explores his voice from chants (Throat singing) to guttural sounds within an interactive urban context. For this TEDXTOKYO 10th anniversary, he shares the stage with Yuzu Natsumi, whom he met while on his fellowship awarded by the US Japan Commission and the National Endowment for the arts. His practice of “Cultural Alchemy” strives to dissolves boundaries between different aesthetic and religious traditions, different races, different spatial, linguistic and musical forms. The end result is to demystify the mystical by making it accessible.” Akim’s work is about bridge making and myth breaking. I use the dance-theater form to explode barriers — between disciplines, cultures, races, “high” and “popular” art, eye and ear, creating borderless performance art that fuses sounds and movements from different genres and invokes a broad spectrum of cultural traditions and artistic disciplines. His mentors include distinguished artists like Bill T. Jones, Bobby McFerrin, and Tea Master Ryotaro Matsumura. I’ve performed my own full-length dance-theater works in temples of high art (Kennedy Center, Whitney Museum, Lincoln Center, BAM), and avant-garde venues (LaMama, Dixon Place,PS122, Blue Note). I’ve taught in prisons, schools and monasteries, opened for Alicia Keys and Stevie Wonder. Yuzu is a Japanese singer/songwriter who comes from a small town in Japan. The style of music she signs is named ‘Urban Folk’ as it combines both urban and traditional elements, from the types of instruments, played to the subject matter of her songs.