TOKYO —

Five decades ago in post-nuclear Japan, butoh innovator Tatsumi Hijikata shocked audiences with grotesque performances that upset established notions of esthetic beauty, resulting in the banishment of the avant-garde dance form from the country’s leading stages.

It’s a measure of just how far butoh has come that when Ushio Amagatsu brought his world-famous Sankai Juku company to Tokyo for a two-week run that began last week, the troupe, based in Paris since the early 1980s, was accorded a welcome befitting a returning conqueror.

It’s also indicative of the extent to which butoh has become an accepted dance form in Japan that Amagatsu’s new piece, “Tobari,” was performed at leading venue the Setagaya Public Theatre, where it elicited no less than three curtain calls from a rapt, standing room only audience.

Compared with Hijikata’s monstrous explorations of the ugliness and pain of the human condition, “Tobari” is a work of sublime beauty in which suffering has a cosmic dimension. Tobari is a Japanese word that means “curtain,” but it also refers to the period of the day when light is fading from the sky, just before nightfall.

The stage was configured literally according to the title. A black backdrop pierced by 6,600 twinkling stars and an equally black, oblong disc with another 2,200 stars on stage evoked the night sky, which Amagatsu explained in a post-performance talk replicated the zodiac of Japan’s summer skies. “In this eternal space, Amagatsu shivers for the vanity of humans and silently screams into emptiness,” stated the production notes. “Happiness and sadness, light and darkness, life and death — they all waver softly like a hanging cloth.”

“Tobari” began in a long moment of absolute pitch black. The lights then rose imperceptibly to reveal three dancers in butoh’s signature white body paint. Hung with loose-fitting white robes, their bald heads further emphasized the monk-like quality of butoh dancers. As Amagatsu said afterwards, butoh’s white paint and shaven heads have two purposes: to negate the individual self, and to provide the blank canvas for the projection of various hues of light. He also noted the long tradition of white paint in Japanese theater, including most famously kabuki.

Against an inky sky, the dancers began to reach and stretch in ghastly rictuses of yearning and desperation. Gradually they were joined by more of Sankai Juku’s seven, all-male dance troupe. In groups of twos and threes, they started to ricochet across the stage like insensate meteoroids through space. The score by Takashi Kako, Yas-Kaz and Yoichiro Yoshikawa underlined the lonely atmosphere with sparse, vaguely Asian-sounding pluckings on what sounded like a sitar and koto.

After some time, this was followed by a passage in which several of the dancers stretched their taut bodies horizontally across the disc at the center of the stage, now lit with soft lights from underneath to create the effect of a solar eclipse. Lean but sculpted, and moving imperceptibly in the way that only butoh dancers can, they seemed caught in some sort of cosmic wind.

Later on in the 90-minute performance, the stars were obscured by another curtain that drew down over the backdrop, leaving only a menacing, reddened, vertical strip of stars down the center. In the only costume change of the production, several dancers reappeared in richly hued multicolored silks, looking like some sort of supernova or alien life form against the stark interstellar background. Amagatsu then appeared in the one solo moment of the evening, his mouth opened in a silent scream as his lean, taught physique tensed in concentration, belying his nearly 60 years.

The spell cast by “Tobari” was such that when it ended, most of the audience stuck around for the post-performance talk. Those who wanted more could look forward to next week’s performances of Toki, Amagatsu’s meditation on time. The month-long Japan tour wraps up in Matsumoto on November first, after which Sankai Juku (“Studio by the Mountain and Sea“) heads to Europe including dates at London’s prestigious Sadler’s Wells.

“Tobari,” which had its world premiere in May at Sankai Juku’s resident Theatre de la Ville in Paris, is another feather in the cap for a director who has evolved into one of the undisputed masters of esthetic minimalism of our era, alongside artists like sometime creative partner and noted classical composer Philip Glass. Butoh may no longer have the power to shock and dismay, but its ability to transfix audiences remains undiminished.

3 Comments

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  rjd_jr at 11:50 AM JST - 7th October

  Looks like the inspiration for future generations of stage shows like the Blue Man group.

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  JohnBecker at 01:46 AM JST - 9th October

  like insensate meteoroids through space

  There are no meteoroids in space. A meteor becomes a meteoroid when it hits the ground.

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  dangrunebaum at 07:40 AM JST - 14th October

  A meteoroid is in space. A meteoroid becomes a meteorite when it hits the ground. A meteor describes the above when seen entering the earth's atmosphere. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor.

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