Mako Kawano is the Alice who, in a touch out of Bronislava Nijinska’s Les Noces, can almost jump rope with her shin-length braids and has them unceremoniously chopped off by an aging White Rabbit (the wonderfully named, and wonderfully expressive, Ravioli Tsuchiya). Kawano is a Gumby-rubberized mover, and that fits the sense of her being manipulated not only by the alarm-clock-checking Rabbit but by Forces of Unreason. She finds herself in a virtual house of mirrors where a crew of duplicate girls appear at the top of the garden wall surrounding her, doing classical ballet steps with girlish delicacy and occasionally soothing her into brief respite. There are wonderful low-tech effects, as when the dancers frolic away and leave their hands behind. But unlike her literary namesake, this choreographed Alice always looks distraught rather than curious about her erratic circumstances.
Nakamura has set Alice to a pastiche of Western music — excerpts from a Bach harpsichord concerto, lip-synched operatic arias, and Gavin Bryars’s ubiquitously danced “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet.” That last choice seems anything but random. As Kawano opens a book, her astonished face is bathed in light emanating from its pages. Bryars, in crescendo, chants about his faith. Is that light atomic radiation? Is the book the Rabbit has left lying around a Bible? Does Western Christian faith lie just outside the walls of Nakamura’s Japanese garden?
DEAD 1 A radical visual purity and sense of
struggle at the brink of existence. |
In a stroke of inspired programming, Pillow director Ella Baff scheduled Ko Murobushi’s Ko & Edge Company to share the stage with Natural Dance Theatre. We got contrasting snapshots of contemporary Japanese dance. Murobushi is a direct disciple of Tatsumi Hijikata, one of the two major founders of butoh, and his current troupe was assembled to perform at Hijikta’s memorial service. In its radical visual purity and sense of struggle at the brink of existence, that legacy shows.In Dead 1, three men — figures, really, it takes a while before you realize they are breathing people — are painted silver and bathed in individual cones of light. Classic butoh is associated with the chalky white of atomic ash and life underground; silver makes their torsos into emblems of industrialization.
Naked except for tiny bikinis, the men balance on their shoulders, legs overhead, with their backs to the audience. From the audience’s vantage point, they seem to be headless. Announced by a crash of Jimi Hendrix (“ ’Scuse me while I kiss the sky!”), the men balance upside down, in silence, until the audience grows restive. Suddenly, one toe curls in, another’s legs begin to bend as the statues begin to founder. Paying attention yet? One of the men stretches out his foot as if trying to find a literal toehold in the air.
Farmyard sounds erupt, and it turns out they are coming from the men. Their ribs expand and ripple like the chin pouches of noisy bullfrogs. The line of their spines begin to read as faces; surrealism teeters on the verge of comedy.
But butoh is no joke. The men uncurl and rise. Jittery, awkward, as if surmounting impossible odds, they look like amphibians crawling out of the mire, gasping as they force their feet to bear their weight, fall, and rise again. As they crawl, the paint rubs off on the stage’s black marley floor, leaving greasy traces beneath their feet. I don’t know whether that decorative effect was planned or just an unavoidable result of sweat mixing with body paint. But in Dead 1 it becomes a piteous, beautiful token of heroic vulnerability.
