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InkBoat’s Cockroach magnifies last breath at Theater Artaud

By Yafonne

Doors knock, hinges creaks, a teacup strikes a saucer repeatedly with mechanical precision. Dressed in a black suit, Shinichi Momo Koga steps slowly down to the stage with his back towards the audience, until he suddenly turns around, his white, painted face aghast. With the expression frozen on his face, he slowly drinks from his teacup and starts to shake. Before long, his whole body is convulsing in pain, the teacup rattling against the saucer. Sinking to his knees, he squats on all fours, looking around, blankly curious.

The dying breath, the last drop of life, is a most precious moment. It can pass in one second or linger on painfully, indefinitely. For Koga, artistic director of inkBoat, a Berkeley-based, sonically driven, experimental butoh ensemble, the dying breath contains a lifetime of its own. This is the moment Koga examines, stretches and magnifies in Cockroach, a bizarre, semi-surreal, semi-hallucinatory jab at a sub-human instinctual reality a man experiences inside his own mind at the edge of death. On stage at Theater Artaud last weekend, it is where memories, characters, sounds and images all converge and collide before being sucked into the black hole of death.

As Koga puts it, “revision and metamorphosis have been the mark of Cockroach since its birth in 1999 in Germany as part of EX-it, a meeting of Butoh dancers.” Tested on the streets of the Mission District in the Summer of 2000 as an “Art Strikes Back” protest against the city’s current real estate crisis, Cockroach aroused bafflement from the San Francisco police. In that context, it was about the human will to survive in spite of holocausts. “I thought of cockroaches as artists, surviving on the margins of society, living and getting by on scraps, despised and shunned by people,” said Koga in an interview last year.

In this latest version for Theater Artaud, though, he has narrowed it down to the ambiguous space between life and death, after his entire 14-member cast of inkBoat moved to Germany for several months to sort out Cockroach with Sten Rudstrom. “We lived through burning times together,” writes Koga in his program notes, “the shape of which has fed this latest Cockroach.”

Koga plays the main character — that of a dying man — his last gasps for life dragged out over 80 minutes, magnified and seen from the point of death. At the same time, a random collage of characters emerge, each dealing with a different aspect of dying and loss, connected only by long stretches of silence, monotonous droning or violent cacophonies of noise.

There is Yuko Kaseki, a Berlin-based dancer who portrays a lady rising slowly from a circle of gray stones, dressed in a thick, dark medieval gown, swaying about languidly. Singing in a melancholy voice, and jerking about with frenzied movements, she shakes herself violently as percussionists in overalls run onto the stage, slamming long metallic poles hanging along the wings. A raucous cacophony ensues, faintly resembling bells of different tones, as the musicians stand at the base of the poles, like firemen ready to respond.

Later, Kaseki rises once more from her circle of stones, stepping in water like a lady bathing, the water trickling down her legs and splashing about her feet. The sound of explosions and churning liquids come from behind the glass of a huge golden frame upstage, revealing a laboratory of musicians controlling and manipulating found sounds and noise. Near the end, she falls out of her circle of stones, wet and struggling. Emerging with great effort, squeezing water out of her dress, she dances a solo of ugly emotions overtaking her and consuming her body into grotesque lamenting shapes.

The most curious part, however, were the cockroaches, their birth and manifestation over time. At first, three thin metallic wires appear, twitching from the wings. Three figures emerge like mysterious ancient wizards cloaked in earthy brown, with purple mesh wrapped about their heads, walking blindly. Silent and authoritative, they surround Koga, bestowing something on him with their twitching wires, before kneeling down backwards like embryonic larvae wrapped in brown shells, with the wires sticking up like antennas out of their mouths.

In another section, they reappear, fully-grown, from under the gigantic white lace dress set suspended upstage. The blind-folded cockroach-humans emerge, performed by butoh dancers Leigh Evans, Tanya Calamoneri, and Kinji Hayashi, tapping their silver canes on the ground to an explosion of rhythmic beats. Swerving about, cautious, tapping, they approach Koga, stalking him as prey.

For comic relief, Haruko Nishimura plays a plump girl in a white dress who enters carrying a chocolate cake, loudly declaring, “I love food, chi gu pi gu!” Like a self-absorbed toddler, she kicks the dying Koga about, poking him and slapping his body into different shapes to her liking, using him as furniture for her cake.

Later on, a hand reaches out from the curtain, grabbing greedily for something. Several more hands reach out from different wings of the stage. Nishimura stumbles out, propelled by her hand, which had a mind of its own. She swallows something and bellows out a huge “burp — oops!” Her torso suddenly begins to explode, accompanied by a guttural series of sounds.

By the end, Koga crawls to the teacup, returning to real time. As he drinks from his cup, the windows high above the stage light up in blue silhouette, while the three cockroaches below stare blankly at a shaft of moonlight coming through.

Though Koga’s transitions can be agonizingly long, his choreography is simple, oddly fresh, and catches the audience by surprise. With an extensive background in Butoh dance, Suzuki Theatre and Action Theatre, Koga has created over 35 productions since 1988. Dividing his time between the United States, Japan and Europe, he is a member of TEN PEN Chii in Germany, and has worked with Butoh dancer Yumiko Yoshida, Larry Reed’s Shadowlight Theatre, Koichi Tamano’s Harupin Ha Butoh Dance Theatre, Do Teatr (Russia), Materia Prima (France) and Minako Seki (Berlin).

Cockroach is an experiment of sorts, mainly with surface movement and noise, that is then taken and re-worked and shaped into something more theatrical. Teeter tottering between life and death, and inhabiting the porous space between humans and insects, Cockroach is a bizarre yet fascinating work that needs more inner direction and centralizing energy. Working with artistic concepts both Asian and Western, it failed somehow to arrive at the power behind them. The collective ideas and voices in Cockroach, though interesting, tend to dilute the centralizing power of Koga’s main concept. But on the whole, Cockroach is worth a peek for its curious tangents and its alternative outlook.

inkBoat employs a deconstruction of forms, drawing from Asian and Western movement, theater and music styles to create visceral, melodramatic performance theater. Catch the last weekend of Cockroach at Theater Artaud (450 Florida Street at 17th Street) December 5-8, 2001. All shows at 8 p.m. For tickets call 415-621-7797 or check out www.ticketweb.com and www.theaterartaud.org.