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Japanese butoh troupe as enigmatic and enticing as the first time

Sunday, September 29, 2002

By Jane Vranish

It has been a highly unlikely love affair.

For more than 15 years, Pittsburgh has embraced the poetic vision of Japanese butoh dance group Sankai Juku. In a City of Champions where explosive athleticism runs rampant, audiences strained to detect the slightest of movements. City sounds that erupted like Bessemer furnaces -- traffic, amplified music, construction -- gave way to silence and stillness.

	Sankai Juku Where: Benedum Center, Downtown. When: 8 p.m. Saturday. Tickets: $20 to $56; 412-456-6666.

When the Pittsburgh Dance Council brought Sankai Juku to town in 1986 to perform its first international work, "Kinkan Shonen," the audience walked out at the end in puzzlement. They had seen nearly naked men slowly descend to the stage from ropes. A peacock wandered about the stage.

We learned early on that it was originally called Ankoku Butoh or "Dance of Darkness" and was later shortened to butoh or "stamping dance." Born as a reaction to the nuclear holocaust, the destruction was displayed in bodies powdered in gray ash, a trickle of blood seeping out of an ear, a silent scream that pierced our souls.

We learned of butoh founder Hijikata, who said he wanted this new art form "to make gestures of the dead, to die again, to make the dead re-enact ... their deaths in their entirety." He would concentrate not on the transformation of the artist into a character, but on the transformation itself.

Other important contributors would be Kazuo Ohno, still a revered figure in Japan at the age of 96, and Min Tanaka, who appeared at The Andy Warhol Museum last December and is noted for his exploration of the origins of dance.

Sankai Juku would give way to more than the grotesque. The singular beauty of its theatrical productions with egg, water and sand elements drew us to nature. They permeated three more productions: "Unetsu" (1990), "Shijima" (1993) and "Yuragi" (1996).

Now, Sankai Juku brings its latest offering, "Hibiki," winner of the Laurence Olivier prize for best new dance production in England.

But we're still asking, "What is butoh?"

Nationally known butoh expert Bonnie Sue Stein met with the company at Jacob's Pillow workshop during its first tour. It was a chance to test America's artists at a workshop in this new form. Stein, who came to the workshop with an interest in experimental theater, was entranced. She would eventually go to Japan for a year to study the language and Noh, among other forms of dance. She was inspired to write about what she saw.

"There are many Japanese forms like Noh that are inherent in the use of time," she explains. "The tempo of Japanese traditional music and dance starts slow, then increases and ends with a bang. In butoh, the artist takes one step and covers a mountainside and 150 years. As soon as you grasp that concept, it opens up a whole other way of thinking. But even it you don't know that, it can still affect you."

In the butoh mystique, according to Stein, Sankai Juku has had the greatest impact on the world at large. In fact, the company gained its fame abroad before being recognized in Japan, probably due to "the combination of stage effect and an almost Broadway level of lighting that magnified the slowness," she says.

With tours to more than 700 cities and 40 countries since 1975, Sankai Juku has had a "huge influence on dance. Hijikata wouldn't run a piece in repertory," she says. "And many people were affected by Min Tanaka. But if they saw three performances in a row, they wouldn't remember the piece because each night was so different."

Sankai Juku founder and choreographer Ushio Amagatsu always had "a global perspective. I always thought of him as far-reaching," Stein notes. Even cutting-edge opera director Robert Wilson admired his work. Likewise, Amagatsu has branched out into opera and "doesn't want to be categorized as butoh anymore."

"Hibiki" may be the last of his butoh dance productions. Like many of his works, it is based on a series of tableaux -- seven in all. The first, "Sizuki," features glass urns that drip water onto large, transparent glass lenses on the floor, allowing the audience to reflect. "Utsuri" relates to a room that dissolves into mysterious shadows. "Garan" is vacant space, where air enters in silence. "Outer Limits of the Red" presents the metamorphosis of the body, followed by "Utsuro," with its reflection on the transformation from icon to image. The final section, "Toyomi," means "More light!"

"More" seems to be the operative word, even though we may appear to see less in this unorthodox dreamscape -- less of the mundane, less of the commonplace, less to jar our own internal rhythms.

Jane Vranish is a free-lance dance and music critic.