Human beings are incompetent social animals. So says Japanese dancer-choreographer Akiko Kitamura in her latest work, “Enact Oneself.”
Set to music by Yusuke Awazu and Yuzo Kako, this 20-minute piece, created for the American Dance Festival’s International Choreographers Commissioning Program (ICCP), received its world premiere this month at Duke University’s Reynolds Industries Theater in Durham, N.C.
With a background in ballet and jazz, the Tokyo-born Kitamura began choreographing as a teenager for commercial films, fashion shows and plays. She founded Leni-Basso in 1994 and has since toured with her company to Belgium, China, Chile and the United States.
While Leni-Basso has carved a reputation for multimedia theatrical spectacles, Kitamura on this occasion favored weighty, free-flowing movement — punctuated by moments of quiet, dramatic tension — to speak for itself unhampered by plot or specific characterization.
In “Enact Oneself,” four men and four women traverse shifting, emotional terrain. They dabble at expressing a range of feelings, feelings that are woven into the fabric of human relationships. The subject may not be original — many choreographers from Anna Sokolow to Jirí Kylián have tackled it in some form — but by eschewing sentimentality, Kitamura manages to renew an age-old topic for the most seasoned of dance viewers.
The dance unfolds in a room decorated only by chairs and music stands, a cloister for the creative. Dressed in Debbie Black’s drab street clothes, the four couples seated on chairs slowly turn inward to meet their partners, only to turn away swiftly upon eye contact. They try again, maneuvering each other’s limbs like curious puppeteers. Arms, shoulders and legs are flung outward or are pulled into place. Growing faster and more resistant, their actions reveal a sense of desperation. These people just can’t seem to connect, no matter what they do.
The dancers bring the chairs into a semi-circle, clearing an arena for their inner battles. Introspective solos intersperse with numerous interactions among and between men and women. In one duet, man and woman meet head-on, their arms defiantly thrust forward, as if locked in a bullfight. Others sit back and watch the encounters like bystanders observing a public quarrel, a spectator sport. Popcorn, anyone?
Just as the dance reaches a rousing, chaotic climax — complete with sheets of white paper strewn everywhere — things skid to a halt. The dancers, now standing in an arc, reach out gingerly with one hand, only to recoil in fear. This concluding image, with its once-bitten-twice-shy connotations, is a sober reminder of our social ineptitude.
“Enact Oneself” came alive in the young, alert bodies of Monica Coates, Shawn Evangelista, Jennifer Felton, Daniel Linehan, Anna Marks, Reba Mehan, Maungsai Somboon and Matthew Sweeney. David Ferri’s elegant lighting schemes suitably shaded and highlighted the stage action.
Also on the ICCP lineup were “POST-C.A.R.D.S.” by French native Dominique Boivin, a cool, speedy dance of recollection and revisitation; and Tatiana Baganova’s “Lazy Susan,” in which a formal party is the backdrop for amusing hijinks with apples, wires and a trampoline.