Festival Snapshots
Hundreds of Butoh dance fans turned out for Dance Network’s 7th Annual San Francisco Butoh Festival held at Theater Artaud this past weekend. This year, festival producer Brechin Flournoy drew on a wide palette of contemporary and emerging artists from Japan, a.k.a. the Japanese New Wave. From coherent to incoherent, from crafted to near total chaos and spurts of pure force — they offered three entirely different takes on reality in young Japan.
Yet, the most unexpected and profound encounter of the festival turned out to be old classic Butoh master Kastura Kan of Thailand whose amazingly translucent solo in “Time Traveler” arrested the entire house last Friday night. In his premiere of “Curious Fish”, sheer beauty, childlike wonder, touching absurdity and animal physicality find uncommon kinship.
Coming from Mexico, Diego Piñon’s “Broken Nostalgy” of a haunting image of a Japanese ghostly doll figure proved lengthy, but well-developed and articulately performed.
Post-modern dance legend Kei Takei’s one time appearance threw all definitions of dance out the window with two extreme solos — the first as emotionally burdened as an Atlas and the second as flighty and bizarre as a cuckoo. She left the audience speechless, scowling or laughing.
Between these two poles of tradition and innovation, the Japanese New Wave of next-generation artists gave a Bay Area debut. Each took creative stabs at modern Japan’s cultural layers — from the witty satires of op.eklekt and the murky masculine sensuality of Yan-Shu, to the incoherent body tantrums of Nibroll.
Op.eklekt Breaks the Ice
Hailing from Kyoto, one of Japan’s oldest cities, the duo Nobuo Kanetani and Mutsumi Oku performs neatly packaged “theatrical satires,” putting a warped spin on everyday Japanese customs, rituals and social mannerisms. Calling themselves op.eklekt, meaning “the eclectic opus of work,” they stole the audiences’ hearts opening night in “Looking at Far East,” which was full of surprising wit and wacky humor.
Attired in Japanese red and black, with white face paint, op.eklekt presented four scenes — a tea ceremony, tennis training, the annual Oseibo gift giving and the religious Gion Festival. Founded in 1991 by Nobuo, who studied dance, choreography, pantomime and Matsumi, who studied textile design and graphic design, op.eklekt has performed throughout Japan, Eastern Europe, East Asia, appearing also in Mexico, Israel and the U.S.
Against the backdrop of expansive airport music, a traditional Japanese tea ceremony gets a humorous twist when transplanted with modern items such as grocery bags, soft drinks cans, and mini-tape recorders. Matsumi takes Polaroid shots of Nobuo, who poses with various facial grimaces, holding her hands in a “v” overhead like Americans.
Next, Matsumi teaches Nobuo tennis using a tennis ball attached to the end of a long stick, a fan to simulate wind and air, a green wired paddle to simulate the tennis net. Through a hilarious miniature re-enactment, where the path of a tennis serve is mechanically broken down to tiny intervals from start to finish, tennis, a respected Western sport, now looks like a bizarre alien ritual.
From there, Matsumi presents Nobuo with a Oseibo gift, wrapped in layers of cloth, which she politely refuses. While they politely take turns unwrapping each layer, their internal reactions run the gamut from facial scowls and stomping on the floor, to lifting a leg to pee like a dog and throwing body tantrums. Nobuo is now dying to find out what is in the box and opens it — only to let out a horrified screech that lasts far into the night.
Yan-Shu Plunges Murky Depths
On a more “traditionally” Butoh wavelength is Yan-Shu, a four-men ensemble led by choreographer Kinja Zulu Tsuruyama, who danced in Europe with Theater Dans Grotesque and German National Opera Theater STATSOPER, and appeared in filmmaker Peter Greenaway’s “The Pillow Book.” Based out of Abestos-kan, the former studio of Butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata and now heart of the Butoh scene in Tokyo, Yan-Shu represents the vanguard of a new Butoh generation.
Having performed throughout Japan and Europe at night clubs, hair shows and traditional theaters, Yan-Shu has appeared at international dance festivals such as The Fringe Festival (Tokyo, Japan), Festival delle Rocche (Torino, Italy), and En P de Pedra Dance Festival (Santiago de Compostera, Spain).
Tsuruyama’s “Zunnja,” or “Fisherman’s Art Factory”, appears to be a lengthy, meandering sketch of raw earthy male sensuality birthed from its primitive murky depths. Barely held together by formal diagonal lines and flat angular designs in space, “Zunnja” appears to go on indefinitely, with no break in line of energy. Dancers Dakei, Michiyasu Furutani, Shigeya Yo become three quirky cave men, full of ambiguous, emerging sensuality, at times absorbed by their impish erotic distractions.
Traveling in sync against a monotonous drone, they move their arms in roving tiger ball like motion, suggesting martial arts moves. With sharp forceful stompings and primitive grunts, they thrust their hands through crotch of their pants, letting out little yelps of pain and fear in their silly self-entrapment.
Tsuruyama plays a writhing mysterious central figure cloaked in thick canvas like fabric, trudging and pulling diagonal lines across the stage, who by the end, emerges in white grotesque beauty amidst spacious sounds and waves of bouncing ropes.
Nibroll Totally Flips Out
If you’ve ever banged your head against a malfunctioning computer, or wanted to smack someone during traffic jams, that’s what Nibroll makes you feel in their “No Parking,” a college-level post-modern dance in Japanese clothing. More akin to a toddler throwing body tantrums all over the stage, their splashes of movement abound with no connection except the common thread of mild violence, mechanical repetition, and superficial pedestrian gestures. Painting a society of stressed out individuals, they take on the characteristics of used up modern technology. Japanese school girls in uniforms prance through a checkered pattern of light across the stage floor, pretending to be high fashion models on runways. Video shots of city traffic, crowded subways and super highways play. Men hurl themselves into the air and run themselves into a frenzy. Women hit men over the head. A man falls backwards, repeats himself like instant re-plays. Later, two clowns interrupt a love-sick loner to say “hello, nice to meet you” with increasing intensity.
Soon the whole stage is filled with people shouting “Hello! How are you?! Nice to meet you!” Words become mindless psychological blows beating people down. People fall, splattered all over the stage. A girl lies on the floor hyper-ventilating to death. A man stands over her orchestrating events around him, punching computer buttons in the air. By the end, he stands up with one knee down as if trying to balance everything on his shoulders. Apparently, today’s young Japan is energetic, frenetic and overwhelmed, trying to fill shoes too big for their sensibilities.
Evidently influenced by American pop culture and Western ways, Butoh’s artistic legacy in Japan, which encourages artists to “find their own dance and be true to their own spirit,” has found a satirical fun house mirror in Japan’s new artists.
Catch the latest in local Butoh: Free student performance directed by Bay Area resident butoh masters Koichi and Hiroko Tamano. Saturday August 18, at 2 PM on Ocean Beach at Fulton and the Great Highway. For information contact Dance Network at (415) 648-1177.
