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Showcase of Surprises

9th Annual Japanese Contemporary Dance Showcase
Japan Society
New York, NY
January 21, 2006

by Tom Phillips
copyright ©2006 by Tom Phillips
    

For nine years now, the annual Japanese Contemporary Dance Showcase at Japan Society has been a stunning cross-section of work by artists little known or completely new to the west. The last few of these eye-opening galas have been curated by Yoko Shioya, performing arts director for Japan Society, who spends much of her year scouring the world  looking for new Japanese artists. Asked recently what her main criterion was for bringing something to New York, she said: “I have to be surprised.”  Once again this year, she succeeded in surprising herself, and us.  

The most striking piece on the program bore the most un-Japanese title—“Bon Appetit!”—and consisted of eight long-haired Japanese women in strapless formal gowns, dancing to an impassioned string quartet around the most un-Japanese of props, a dinner table with straight-backed chairs. The group is called Roussewaltz, and it was founded by choreographer Kaoru Uchida, when she returned to Japan in 2003 after a sojourn in Paris. All the elements were from the west, and the choreography was like Paul Taylor at his wildest—dancers diving across the table, rolling on the floor, leaping over and under each other.  Still, there was something peculiar about the piece. For one thing, the absence of any partners—e.g. men—put this romance in the realm of the purely fantastical, and implied a certain abstraction in the passions on display. The piece ended with a sharp release of breath from all eight women, seated at their table and looking straight at the audience:  “Ha!” That was untranslatable, but it seemed to be a typically Japanese note of independence from the western styles they had so clearly mastered.  In any case, the piece succeeded in catching and keeping the eye, with gorgeous dresses flying up and around the eight glamorous and athletic performers.

Yukiko Amano’s solo “Compeito” looked like another comic take on western romanticism, Japanese-style.  Her music mixed Rachmininoff and Johann Strauss with drone-like disco drumming. Her dancing was childlike, almost autistic, as she dragged around a ball of yarn tied to her neck, then unwound it and got herself hopelessly tangled up. 

Two other acts were more clearly drawn from Japanese theatrical traditions. Shinonome Butoh, a three-woman group, used chalky white makeup, traditional costumes, and the slow, distorted, turned-in movements that make Butoh a uniquely Japanese expression of darkness and despair. (They also used a skateboard that morphed into an imaginary guitar.) And Youya Shinjo called on the spirits of the Noh and Kabuki Theater in a twitching, episodic solo in which he struggled with an enveloping fabric, a walking stick and his own hugely amplified shadow.

The first act on the bill was the funniest—a screwball workplace comedy by a group called Ape. Five junior salarymen and three suit-clad female helpers learn the ropes of Japanese corporate life, a madcap mix of industrialism, militarism, and eroticism. It begins with a training session that looks like an army drill with chimpanzees, then goes into a corporate clothing lesson in which a young man runs into his suit jacket backwards, then wrestles his female dresser to the floor.  

Office romance blooms in the end as four couples slow-dance to the strains of “Unchained Melody,” linked by little pink glow sticks between their index fingers. One of the couples consists of two men who are having more fun than anyone, even though they are kept at a respectable distance by a glow stick six feet long.    

Though the program included wildly different elements and styles, it retained a strong Japanese flavor throughout.  Asked about the source of that flavor, director Shioya said it may come in large part from Japanese artists’ “loose sense of structure.”  With fewer or no rules about what goes where or what comes next, it’s easier for Japanese artists to surprise.  And delight.

Volume 4, No. 3
January 23, 2006

copyright ©2006 Tom Phillips
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last updated on January 23, 2006