The birthday season opened last night with Sankai Juku at the Center for the Arts with Su-Chen-I-mean-Hong-Xi. I’ve yet to get used to her name change. I always wanted to change my name to Barabas. Or Bunny, like Sargeant Carter’s girlfriend. Anyway, Sankai Juku is this Japanese butoh group that I’ve been following for years, and it’s been five years since they were last in town. Butoh is a dance form that evoloved out of post-war Japan, involving sometimes dark and grotesque imagery and jerking contorted bodies dusted in rice flour. Sankai Juku is probably the best known practitioners of the form, and certainly the most elegant.
Their piece last night was called Kagemi, or “Mirror.” It opened with a single performer on a circle at the edge of a square platform. The platform was filled with giant lotus leaves, which rose to the ceiling, revealing more dancers, writhing around and mirroring each other’s actions, like a performance in some kind of lovely primordial soup. At one point a single dancer was left on the rectangle, in a very refined and almost sentimental dance, the music bringing tears to my eyes, and then suddenly, as if to blast the sentiment to kingdom come, out popped several dancers in post-apocalyptic tattered clothing, dipping their hands in their bloody sides and smearing little stripes on each other to the drone of a blaring cacophony of sounds. Their rice powder makeup forms a little cloud around them when they move around more aggressively. They remind me of the guy in Munch’s The Scream cross-pollinated with Charles Schultz’s Pigpen in the dream of Nijinski undergoing electro-convulsive therapy in a Japanese internment camp. What an incredible evening. Oh, when they come out to take a bow, they just stand there, in a sculptural row, one guy moving his hand a teeny bit, the choreographer in the center slowly curtsying (this takes about 5 minutes) while extending his arm outward in a circular gesture of touched affection. The bow alone is worth the price of admission.
More birthday adventures to follow…