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."