Dance Circus 36

The Dance Circus program is an opportunity for amateur dance artists to showcase their work at Art Theatre Db. Art Theatre Db is run by DanceBox, a dance NPO founded in 1996. DanceBox offices are located adjacently to Art Theatre Db in Festival Gate, a nearly abandoned shopping mall/amusement park in the southern part of Osaka. To enter the Dance Circus, a dancer needs only to submit a videotape application to Dancebox a few months in advance and have a piece that is 12 minutes or less. The executive director of DanceBox told me that almost everyone who applies to the Dance Circus is accepted- they run the program four times a year, and each run has a few nights with five different performers each night.

My primary aim for this project is not to see exotic dancing or dancing that makes me believe in love again; instead, I want to see dance that is relative to where I live and what I am experiencing. As a resident in the Kansai area, I want to see something that I can relate to my daily life. According to this logic, when popular, globe-travelling dance companies perform in my area, I will not be taking notes furiously, as the dance reflects a more globally-effected perspective than the community introspection that I seek. A dance concert like Dance Circus fits my dance need perfectly- it is a sampling of amateur artists who were mostly born and raised in this area. Spending 60 minutes in a dance concert of this sort seems analogous with immersing oneself in the Osaka dance conscious.

The first night of Dance Circus was November 14th. The first performer was a woman wearing a plain white dress and a straw hat. She began the piece by lying on the floor. The slightest movement entered into her toes and spread into larger movements of the feet and hands. When she stood, her hat covered her eyes, and expression was delivered entirely through gesture.

The second piece was a duet between a vagabond singer and a ballerina. It seemed as though the singer was the ballerina's tormentor.

The third performer was my favorite of the evening. At the beginning of his piece, the lights and music were turned on, but the stage was empty. From his seat in the back row of the audience, he stood up and excused his way past fellow audience members and onto the stage. Dancing to repetitive music, his movements were smooth and undulating complimented by staccato movements, like a robot doing tai-chi. When the music ended, he executed an energetic and repetitive movement in place, moving his arms and legs like a cheerleader and chanting "me, my, fu, yu, hand on my." These two elements were repeated - the robot tai-chi and the cheerleader. At the end, his tai-chi robot began to malfunction with the screaming of the word "wa", and his movement grew more chaotic and into jumpy slam-dancing. When he was about to begin the cheerleader movement again, a man peered through the backstage door. The performer saw the man peering at hime and then resumed his seat in the audience.

The fourth piece was a duet by a man and a woman in matching billowy shirts and pants. They were well-trained modern dancers, with clean lines and difficult movements.

The fifth piece was a girl from Yuko's (the same dancer Yuko from future entries) school, some art college in Osaka. She was wearing red boxing gloves and a red mask, with a red bandanna that covered her eyes. She started by "vacuuming" the spots of light on stage with a vacuum cleaner. While moving in an athletic modern dance style, she said "my arm, my leg, my head, my hips, my arm." At the end, she turns the vacuum cleaner on herself, and the machine sucks up her clothes and takes off her bandanna. Her final words are "my eye, your eye."

The second night was November 15th. The entire program, unlike the night before, was mainly movement influenced by modern dance. The first three pieces were all duets the experimented with the relationship between the two performers. Through their body language and facial expressions, the audience must imagine what their relationship was and what conflict existed between them. The last two pieces were a solo and a duet that both had the theme of man as automaton in society, a theme I saw in yesterday's performance with the robot tai-chi man.

The first of these two, a solo by Hajime Uchiyama, was amazing. At the beginning, screeching loud drums are playing and a man wearing only white underwear is lying on his back with his feet over his head. It is a view which humiliates the man, as he is bare with his crotch facing the audience. On top of this, he is shaking convulsively. In the center of the stage, a suitjacket hangs from the ceiling on a hanger. The man gets up and puts on a white-collared shirt. His next movements are simple and specific upstage, depicting either sitting on the train or working in the office, or both. After completing these actions, he walks to the downstage, opens and chugs an entire can of beer while an anthemic song about "the iron fist" plays. He tosses the empty can aside. The audience has one aisle in the center - he storms this aisle, running to the very top of it, and then tumbles back down to the stage. He repeats this over and over, slamming his body into the aisle stairs and bleeding by the end of it. At the end, he mops up the beer on the stage floor with his shirt, throws his shirt at the hanging blazer, and leaves.

The audience reaction was palpable. The entire piece was dark, but perhaps the most apocalyptic and charged sections were the completion of the beer and the rush into the audience. At this point, it was obvious what the dancer was conveying - the life of a salaryman, and the loss of dignity therein. He equated being a robot in the workforce with being degradated (naked) and desparate (drinking and rushing). Sitting in audience left was a group of young men, perhaps the performer's friends. At the climactic moment of the piece, they were laughing. Maybe it was funny that their buddy was drinking a beer onstage. But, the laughter added to the nervous feeling in the audience. As he rushed the stage, an old man in audience left looked away. I was captivated, but it seemed like the older members of the audience didn't want to watch.

The last piece, a duet, did not enthrall me like Uchiyama did, but they enforced the theme of a robotic worker in society. They both had spiky hair and matching metallic-colored outfits and makeup. As techno music played, they performed repetitive movements that mirrored mundane work and assembly-line duties. The movements were very repetitive and never strayed very much from the original movement.

I received the sampling of Kansai dance that I had hoped to see. Also, I saw a continuum of theme among all of the pieces I saw that were all-male - the theme of being an automaton in society, especially in regards to economic labor. In May I will interview Uchiyama and ask him what inspired him to create his piece.

Today's youth seem overall disillusioned with the work situation. Full-time positions with a company are not as stable or available as they were a few decades ago. On top of this, they require a lot of overtime work, so that people do not have a chance to cultivate a life outside of the office - fathers seldom get to spend time with their children, and women have difficulty marrying and having children while working at the same time. Many young people are working part-time jobs. Also, as the American idea of individualism is becoming a global idea, I think this generation of Japanese people have more society-dissenters; there are more people who want to carve their own path rather than getting a position with a company and working at one company for the rest of their life. For example, tonight I am going to a rock concert. I met the band outside of Sannomiya station one night. They play out there almost every night, and work part-time jobs during the day. They called themselves "hippies."

Sennichimae Blue Sky Dance Club

Sennichimae Blue Sky Dance Club performed "The End of Water" on October 24 in Art Theater Db. Their performance was the first one that I saw in the Kansai area. It was a new place and a new dance company, but their name was familiar. An article in the NY Times early 2005 described their performance of "A Bowl of Summer" in the annual Japanese Contemporary Dance Showcase. Critic Anna Kisselgoff called their performance one of the highlights of the evening:

"The club's choreographer, Akadama, and female dancers (Inakichi, Teruteru, Ponta, Kulala and Suzume) may use one name but their range is not limited. Unlike other rebels against Butoh, Japan's expressionist dance, they have not discarded Butoh's movement technique of detailed slow-motion muscular control. As they sat, knees up, like admonished schoolgirls, their faces deepened into grimaces and smiles. Butoh's theme of cataclysm and rebirth, however, was absent."

Kisselgoff's words are clear and precise, words of a seasoned veteran of dance criticism of New York. I was venturing onto a new subway line into a new performance space in a new country. On top of that, I wanted to be able to say something about the performance afterwards. What follows is my recollection of that dance experience:

I felt an ominous and anxious feeling before, and I felt different afterwards and changed the next day. If I were to explain it to someone who had never seen dance before, I would ask them to think of an epiphanous sort of experience they have had. Upon closer inspection, maybe the experience dashed expectations, challenged what we thought of as "natural," or did not fit our categories set for life. Or, maybe our own catefories felt lacking before, and the experience added to them, giving them shape. I can dance around it all day, the topic of human experience and the difficulty of translating it to verbal ideas. And that's what dance is - an experience.

When you watch dance, what are you experiencing?

An entirely different world. As I walked around Doubutsuen-mae subway station before the show, I already felt like I was in a foreign place. The area was older and had less of the global edge than the Japan that I know. The atmosphere ranged from apathetic to hostile towards me. Passing the mom-and-pop porn stores, pachinko parlors, restaurants specializing in live sea turtles, and me, trying to pretend that I knew where I was going, when the street pattern did not make sense to me and dumped me onto a new street instead of completing the circular route that I imagined.

Then there was festival gate itself, a symbol of the breakdown of the commercial and the desolation of the modern symbolized in an abandoned-looking shopping mall. A tarp-covered fountain sat in the middle of the bottom floor as inoperable roller coaster tracks rose from the atrium ceiling.

Into another strange world, contained in the black box theater of Art Theatre Db, I am invited to "Imagine a world without water," states the playbill. As I take my seat, I see five columns of falling goo arranged circularly on stage. The goo stretches from the ceiling before collapsing on the floor, as if it were giving up. Stagehands remove it. Blackout. From blackout to lights up, symbolizing birth into a new world.

When the lights come up, five women are lying motionless on the ground, where the puddles were previously falling. Sounds of ocean waves become audible, and they lie still for some time, until the slightest breath enters their bodies, developing into twitches slowly reanimating them until they can feebly stand. Each woman wears a long, thick white wig and is wrapped in white cloth from shoulders to thighs. What follows is a slow procession of the group circularly on stage. They walk bent forward, knees bent, shaking. The strength of their visible, wiry leg muscles somehow adds to the vulnerability of their posture. Each footstep is uncertain, anxious, careful. They,too, were just born into a new world. Are they the death of water? Are they the birth of humans in the absence of water? Perhaps in a fleeting moment I can describe what they are, but what they embody is constantly in flux and sometimes defies labelling at a specific moment. Maybe they are non of what i think, maybe they are all of what i think. Their procession resembles the cohesive movement of water, and their movement identifies the vulnerability and uncertainty of people.

The section ends when they are in a horizontal line upstage facing the audience, and one woman slaps her thigh, as if a fly landed there. The other women's faces animate as their eyes track the flight path of invisible flies, and the slaps escalate.

The music changes, and the performers run upstage to suitcases, from which they do a costume change onstage. They remove their wigs and trade their white bandage clothing for beige clothing that resembles what adventurers would wear in the desert, like khaki shorts and a light t-shirt. While they change onstage, they are all fully naked at one point, except for panties. There is nothing sexual about it, as they are just human bodies rushing from one covering to the next, almost clumsily. It is an intimate moment with no pretense of performance. As they change, they also transform from feminine bodies (white wigs, bandages,and vulnerability) to masculine bodies, in shorts and tank tops, preparing to do loud, aggressive, and athletic movement. They all have their hair pulled back. Except for the strongest dancer, who has a shaved head underneath her wig.

The masculinity of the next section is epitomized by the bull dance the women perform. It is a lowered-gravity, charging dance with the two fingers pointing above the head like bull horns. In Japan, I think the gesture of these horns means the person is a "devil," although it appeared as a bull to my perspective. The section is gesture-heavy, strong, athletic, and even tiring to watch. It is delirious, how the dancers mix comedic and extreme gestures with running and spinning. I thought maybe they had gone insane from a lack of water. Maybe they were the land cracking apart violently. Maybe they were neither or both.

In the next section, one woman clad in kimono walks slowly from the back of the house, through a center walkway in the audience. As she walks slowly onto the stage, there is a sound of a jet plane. There is a feeling of suspense, as if a bomb has dropped and it will explode at any moment. As if we are all waiting for its detonation.

Next, a bright light is carried downstage center and pointed towards the house, so that the audience is blinded, and we cannot see the stage. This goes on for some time, and I hear a voice in English say "it is intermission?" The lights come up onstage, and the five women performers are sitting in wooden-backed chairs. They are wearing long Western-style ball dresses and matching hair pins. Each watches herself in a small, circular hand-held mirror. At first they seem to be only vainly perusing their faces. They, they begin assuming extremely different attitudes and personalities - anger, jealousy, seduction, sadness, happiness, and so forth. As this dance of the face progresses, many personas pass through each performer. They they simultaneously turn their mirrors towards the audience as the back curtain drops, reavealing a large mirror in which the audience is reflected.

The meaning feeled straightforward at the time - they were showing us what they saw in their mirrors, and it was "us" (the audience). We are all the same body, all interchangeable and inseparable, like water.

Were the dancers watching themselves pretend to be all of those different attitudes, or were they reacting to what they saw in the mirror, ignorant to the fact that they were looking at themselves? I remember an angry face developing for a prolonged period of time, as if it was provoked more and more by the face in the mirror. As human beings, what do we know about our own identities?

As the large mirror in the back was exposed, the audience members were definitely made aware of herself again. The unexpected mirror was a confrontational moment. In an audience, I am able to be invisible and lose all consciousness of myself. Yet at the end, here is myself, reflected in a large mirror. Mirror or not, I always feel self-conscious when I watch butoh, either because of the dancers intense focus or their vulnerable depiction of humanity.