Journey Without Maps

By JAY COCKS

Japan's Sankai Juku revels in primal movement

Against an insinuating stillness, eerie at first, then almost instantly recognizable and reassuring as a cradle, four shapes appear near the top of the high stage, spinning. They wind and slide slowly down thin umbilical ropes suggesting, as they unbend near the ground, unborn children tumbling through the birth canal.

A single man, solitary on stage, stands staring through a piece of rectangular plastic, a small, open circle rounded by red at its center. He falls backward, rigid, his body hitting the ground so hard it raises clouds of dust and makes a sound like a dull detonation. A siren starts to shriek. It could be a warning, or a summons.

These, respectively, are the opening images of two dance theater pieces by Sankai Juku, Jomon Sho (Homage to Prehistory) and Kinkan Shonen (The Kumquat Seed), which have the clear, smooth grace of a rock in a Japanese garden and the impact, simultaneously, of the same rock hurled. Each piece has a rather spindly framework that is part narrative, part philosophical speculation and part rendering of the collective unconscious poised perpetually between rigor and hysteria. Jomon Sho is a plunge into the mythic past and is the more literal of the two pieces Sankai Juku presented last week at New York's City Center. Kinkan Shonen is meant to be, according to a subtitle in the program, "a young boy's dream of the origins of life and death." But the excitement of both works is really their open-endedness, the way in which they resolve the knottiest of paradoxes: to be universal while remaining specific, to summon shared memories from a splintered past.

Ushio Amagatsu, 34, who founded Sankai Juku (the name means studio of the mountains and the sea) in Tokyo in 1975, and remains its director as well as one of its five performers, works in a style of contemporary Japanese dance called buto, in which, he has written, "the body enters a state of perfect balance. Buto belongs both to life and to death. It is a realization of the distance between a human being and the unknown." Like other artists working from within a conception of Japanese modernism--the film director Nagisa Oshima, the designer Issey Miyake--Amagatsu is obsessed with redefinition. Buto, at its point of origin in the social and artistic turmoil of the '60s, was brooding, even brutal, full of images of apocalypse. It was revolutionary, but by the time Amagatsu began his work with Sankai Juku, it was in need of refinement.

There are images of deep despair in both of Sankai Juku's performance pieces, but they mix now with scenes of spiritual questing and transcendence, all performed with the erotic austerity of some deep sense memory. The style of buto now performed by Sankai Juku is an exercise in selective simplicity, like a piece of wood planed and smoothed so only the knot in the center remains.

As Amagatsu and his four dancers coil and slide, curl and waddle, spring and go still, they seem to shape themselves into grooves. Their bodies, whitened with traditional Kabuki makeup, can go as stiff as steel beams being hoisted skyward on a cable, as supple and serpentine as a garden stream. When Amagatsu moves diagonally across a stage past two huge brass circles in Jomon Sho, the movement is a piece of modest majesty that sets down a single, perfect line in Sankai Juku's geometry of mystery.

With the grace of history and the kindness of time and continued growth, Sankai Juku's unique voice may come to seem like greatness. It is a voice without words, like one of the silent sounds the dancers often mouth, their faces contorted like ancient tribal masks. Program notes attempting to describe segments of each of the two 90-minute pieces (such as "ripple of last breath" or "the vanity of nature") may be meant as signposts to a wondering, wandering audience, but no maps are really necessary for this journey.

Verbalized ideas only encumber these primal parables. The singular glory of Sankai Juku is that it achieves almost pure metaphor. It is not like anything else.

Rather, it becomes the thing that all else is like.

--By Jay Cocks