Sankai Juku, the Paris-based Japanese butoh troupe, has returned to Taipei for the first time in almost a decade.
The 42-year-old troupe, founded and led by artistic director Ushio Amagatsu, will be at the National Theater for two shows, tomorrow and Saturday, of his 2015 production Meguri (回) on the company’s fifth visit to Taipei.
Sankai Juku was last in Taipei in at the end of August 2008 with Kagemi — Beyond the Metaphors of Mirrors, which was inspired by an installation of lotus leaves at an ikebana exhibition that Amagatsu saw in the 1970s.
Photo: Courtesy of Sankai Juku
Butoh, for the uninitiated, is a Japanese dance theater form that began to evolve in the 1950s as an exploration of the shamanistic elements of traditional Kabuki and Noh theater, and Western modern dance as part of an effort to counter the influence of US cultural dominance by seeking a return to a more spiritual, primitive art form. Bu (舞) means dance in Japanese, while toh (踏) is to stamp on the ground.
Its originators were also influenced by meditation and traditional martial arts as shown in the mixing of slow, almost glacial movements and sharp, quick, even playful ones. However, there is no one school of butoh, for each style is an idiosyncratic as its originator.
In many ways, Amagatsu’s style of butoh reminds me of Legend Lin Dance Theatre (無垢舞蹈劇場) founder Lin Lee-chen’s (林麗珍) work: the shaven-head performers’ bodies encased in layers of alabaster white body paint that obliterates their identities; costumes and stage designs that range from monastic to opulent; slow tranquil movements interrupted by bursts of energy; the austere otherworldliness, almost religious sensibility, of the performances.
Photo: Courtesy of Sankai Juku
Both Amagatsu and Lin have put their modern dance training to use to create their own movement vocabularies that emphasize amazing physical control. The stillness of the dancers also serves to force audience members out of their busy everyday lives into a more hypnotized, dreamlike state where time becomes immaterial. Nothing can be rushed, one just has to sit back and watch.
The subtitle of Meguri is “Teeming Sea, Tranquil Land,” which pretty much sums up the message that Amagatsu is trying to get across.
The set design, judging from photographs and videos, is stunning: a massive, textured wall relief of Paleozoic fossilized crinoids — a marine animal sometimes called a sea lily because of its resemblance to the flower — that looms over the sandy floor, with a smattering of small wooden platforms.
As usual, Amagatsu has divided Meguri in seven sections — seven is a constant motif in his works. The scenes depict the cyclical patterns of nature such as the circulation of water, the four seasons, the transitions of the Earth as well as his continued interest in a “dialogue with gravity.”
The eight performers, including the 68-year-old Amagatsu and veterans Semimaru, Toru Iwashita and Sho Takeuchi, walk, crawl, sometimes in unison, sometimes solo, specks of powder floating off their bodies as they spin, to a score composed by Takashi Kako, Yas-Kaz and Yoichiro Yoshikawa that ranges from quiet percussive beats and strings to lush orchestrations.
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