The entire universe can be contained within a stage. Sankai Juku, Ushio Amagatsu's Butoh performance group, consumed Power Center this weekend with a world of heightened human emotion amidst a setting in which nature and art merge and humanity humbles itself to larger forces.
Butoh, begun in post-World War II Japan as a reaction against tradition and Westernization, sought to break all boundaries of established dance. Performers began to unearth taboos in their actions of showing the bottoms of their feet and touching their navels. Darkness, entropy, imbalance, multiple personalities, especially the demonic personality - all of these ideas are still explored in this movement form that digs into the subconscious and continues to question and express the human condition.
So simple, so pure, yet its spirituality is beyond complete human comprehension; Sankai Juku's performance gives a sense of a world greater than the physical. Everyone can relate in some aspect, for who is not a note within the universal rhythms of our cosmos? "Yuragi: In a Space of Perpetual Motion," Amagatsu's newest work for five male dancers, is an hour and a half of consuming intensity, concentration and movement stemming from the deepest part of soul.
Inspired by the lack of attention to our own bodies - how we wake up each morning and forget that each organ takes a unique position within our biological system, and how bodies try to resist gravity yet fail because gravity always exists - Amagatsu and his dancers explore on stage the body's relationship to earth and that which is above and below it. They do not act like they know something that eludes the rest of us. Continually searching, they come to no conclusions, rather they remain caught up in the circles of the universe.
The dancers, bald, painted completely white with a powdery paste, wearing only simple white drapery, are bodies not completely beautiful. They go through a metamorphosis in which the inner body sometimes tries to escape. Red splotches drip from their ears and toes. They imitate animals - turtles, fish. Humans looking beyond the human. They shuffle through 1,000 pounds of fine sand covering the stage floor and 13 plexi-glass discs hanging from the ceiling which they sometimes rock and jostle, creating celestial hiccups in their staged universe.
The aesthetic of the stark statue-like dancers, carrying themselves with controlled power against a black nebulous background seeming to extend back for eternity echoes the ying-yang of the cosmos. The bodies, utterly present in their heightened state, yet minuscule within the setting, know they are alive, yet realize that they are only elements like clouds, sky and fish. This often comes out in codified Butoh gestures such as torsos thrust to the heavens, hands mimicking lotus flowers and the "silent scream," mouth pursed open in an agonizing look, face to the sky, as if swallowing the universe.
Butoh dance perpetuates the principle of art and nature as one being and "Yuragi" is no exception. Two live rabbits, resting atop pillars in two corners of the stage, an installation by artist Natsuyuki Nakanishi are part of the universe through which the dancers glide. Amagatsu's opening and final solo occur under the downstage pillar. He moves on the earth as the rabbit rustles through the air above his head. They coexist, yet neither can predict the actions of the other.
Amagatsu's positioning of himself to begin and end the piece in the same place on stage conveys the important image of birth, rebirth and the circularity of life. The dancers work with circular formations often, echoing the shape of the hanging discs. Throughout the seven different sections of "Yuragi," the discs are lowered and raised, suggesting the movement of the heavens. The dancers themselves manipulate and rock the large circles, allowing them to gently sway with their natural rhythms. In an especially powerful solo, Amagatsu dances center stage around one disc at his knee-level. He and the heavenly structure are spotlighted, while the other discs remain many feet above his head.
Amagatsu leaves us with the image of a finger pointed up to the sky. "Yuragi" captures the essence of heaven and earth, but cosmic life will be in perpetual motion, beyond Sankai Juku's standing ovation.
A Sankai Juku dancer performs Ushhio Amagatsu's "Yuragi: In a Space of Perpetual Motion."