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.