In 2015 Jay Hirabayashi and Barbara Bourget welcomed the Japanese butoh company Dairakudakan to the Vancouver International Dance Festival. Their presentation of the wild and surreal Mushi no Hoshi (Space Insect) was a sensation (I wrote about that performance here). Since then Hirabayashi and Bourget have gotten to know the company and its charismatic founder and lead performer, Akaji Maro, quite well, traveling to Japan to train with them and now inviting Dairakudakan back to Vancouver on the occasion of the company's 45th anniversary to present Paradise, their latest full-length work.
In the program notes Maro says that he has no problem imagining what hell looks like. For paradise, however, it's another story. His solution was to begin with the word itself, specifically its Persian etymological root, which means "enclosed garden." This of course synchs up with a Christian cosmology that begins with Adam and Eve romping through an earthly paradise, and that supposedly ends with a rapturous rising of the righteous and redeemed to a heavenly one. However, as Maro additionally notes, in Buddhism another word for hell is Sukhavati, or "Western Paradise." And it is this very dialectical relationship between apparent opposites--heaven and hell, garden and desert, life and death, misery and ecstasy--that constitutes Maro's vision of paradise in this piece.
The work is structured in eight movements. In the first, "Nature," the curtains part to reveal the full company, in traditional white body paint, crouched downstage, a single trembling mass that is punctuated by individual heads every now and then twisting this way and that. Slowly the twenty dancers stand up and fan out in a circle, their bodies attached by chains to the central figure of a green-robed Maro, who had been hidden amongst them, and around whom they now pivot like slaves to an all-powerful god, or maybe just cogs in the wheel of some churning elemental force that needs them as much as they need him. For when the company members eventually release themselves and leave Maro alone on stage dragging his chains about his skirts against a projected backdrop of lush forest he appears like a once mighty tree that is about to teeter and fall.
The piece is filled with stunning imagistic moments that play with both religious and popular conceptions of paradise: two snake-like figures, their bodies wound with rope, who tempt two trios of men and women with forbidden fruit; wooden containers atop which six women contort their bodies, their bottoms at one point pushed skywards by the utterly surprising appearance of six male heads rising up from unseen holes in the boxes and pressing against the women's pelvises; a disco parade of "Club Paradise" revellers roller-skating about the stage; the deaths and burials of these same revellers in a rainstorm of rose petals presided over by Maro; and finally a re-chaining of the entire company to the central figure of Maro, who over the course of this paradisal journey seems to have become unsettled in his being. "Who am I? What am I?," he asks at the end. It's an accounting of self that in many traditions we have to make before being granted access to paradise. But here, in the feverishly imaginative worlds conjured by Maro and Dairakudakan on stage, the suggestion is that such questions are prompted through a by no means benign encounter with paradise itself.
P.
Showing posts with label Akaji Maro. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Akaji Maro. Show all posts
Saturday, March 11, 2017
Sunday, March 22, 2015
Dairakudakan at the Vancouver International Dance Festival
The showcase event of this year's Vancouver International Dance Festival, Dairakudakan's Mushi no Hoshi (Space Insect) concluded its two night run at the Vancouver Playhouse last evening. Founded and led by Akaji Maro, who studied with the legendary Tatsumi Hijikata (together with Kazuo Ohno, one of the pioneers of butoh as a form), Dairakudakan is one of the oldest and most respected butoh companies in Japan. The company brought its latest evening-length creation to VIDF, an epic blending of the ancient and the futuristic that, like all great works of butoh, is about animating metamorphosis--both in terms of image and in terms of movement. In the case of Mushi no Hoshi there was an added thematic resonance to butoh's traditional post-atomic, in extremis somatic concerns, as movies from Them to Starship Troopers have repeatedly reminded us that if any creatures are going to survive--and even thrive--after a nuclear apocalypse, it's insects.
Thus, on a set dominated by one large central and four smaller surrounding platforms encircled by long vertical poles (suggesting at once wind chimes and prison bars), the piece begins with a scene entitled "End of Days." The full company, which numbers more than 20, moves automaton-like in a circle around the main platform; each dancer is clad in street clothes, though their exposed limbs and faces are covered in butoh's signature white chalk. Sliding one leg forward, and then the next, while bending in the opposite direction at the waist, the shell-shocked group slowly progresses in a circuit. At a certain point, one of the women turns to face the audience, opening her eyes and mouth in horror, before falling back in line with the onward march of the group. Each of the other dancers will greet us in a similar manner, their individual expressions of distress or stupefaction variations on a collective trauma. Eventually pairs of dancers will break out of the group and join each other inside the enclosed main platform, adopting poses or executing repetitive movements suggestive of extreme agitation.
Following a brief blackout we are immediately transported to the world of our insect visitors, with five men in the company emerging from the wings on all fours; they wear overturned teapots on their heads and rope girdles wrapped around their waists. The effect is comic, but in a suitably disturbing way; the point is that they look alien, and whether dancing upright with jazz hands on crawling about the stage on the tips of their fingers, the sense images these dancers convey can't help insinuating themselves with a shudder into one's own body. Especially when five women from the company seem to be imprisoned within the platforms, at once guarded and baited by the men in teapots, as well as by four apparent overlords--distinguished by the fact that we can see their faces and they wear rope epaulets (my favourite detail among all the brilliant costuming effects). Soon, however, the women are freed by a sage-like figure who is very visibly coded as from another era, and who will return at various crucial points throughout the piece.
At first, based largely on this opening establishment of Mushi no Hoshi's "insect zone," I was wont to see Maro as reinscribing various traditional gender hierarchies--binaries which, in the insect world, don't always pertain in the ways they still unfortunately do among most human societies. But the women will get their revenge on the men, as when, in a stunning sequence involving a series of swooping butterfly nets, the mesh from the nets descends upon the heads of the men. As for Maro himself, he plays an enigmatic and deliberately gender-ambiguous central figure who emerges from a downstage pupa-like sandbox every now and then to show us the successive stages of his transformation--which are only partly, I would argue, about the fluid spaces between male and female. Maro's character will eventually end up inside the central platform dancing a duet with a fearsome and powerfully resistive woman who somehow transcends her apparent sacrificial status, the viscera of her body turned outward on her all-white dress--a scabrous badge of honour, and an indictment, rather than a victimizing wound.
In a show filled with amazing visual tableaux, Maro saves the best for last: the full company, now caked in shiny silver body paint, and with their faces covered by mesh cloths, emerging as a chorus-line, their twisted arachnid-like homogeneity offset by the distinguishing facial self-image that each of them wears around their necks. It's an ending entirely appropriate to the story Maro is telling, but also to butoh as a form: for underneath the white body paint each dancer is encouraged to find and express his or her own distinct movement vocabulary.
P.
Thus, on a set dominated by one large central and four smaller surrounding platforms encircled by long vertical poles (suggesting at once wind chimes and prison bars), the piece begins with a scene entitled "End of Days." The full company, which numbers more than 20, moves automaton-like in a circle around the main platform; each dancer is clad in street clothes, though their exposed limbs and faces are covered in butoh's signature white chalk. Sliding one leg forward, and then the next, while bending in the opposite direction at the waist, the shell-shocked group slowly progresses in a circuit. At a certain point, one of the women turns to face the audience, opening her eyes and mouth in horror, before falling back in line with the onward march of the group. Each of the other dancers will greet us in a similar manner, their individual expressions of distress or stupefaction variations on a collective trauma. Eventually pairs of dancers will break out of the group and join each other inside the enclosed main platform, adopting poses or executing repetitive movements suggestive of extreme agitation.
Following a brief blackout we are immediately transported to the world of our insect visitors, with five men in the company emerging from the wings on all fours; they wear overturned teapots on their heads and rope girdles wrapped around their waists. The effect is comic, but in a suitably disturbing way; the point is that they look alien, and whether dancing upright with jazz hands on crawling about the stage on the tips of their fingers, the sense images these dancers convey can't help insinuating themselves with a shudder into one's own body. Especially when five women from the company seem to be imprisoned within the platforms, at once guarded and baited by the men in teapots, as well as by four apparent overlords--distinguished by the fact that we can see their faces and they wear rope epaulets (my favourite detail among all the brilliant costuming effects). Soon, however, the women are freed by a sage-like figure who is very visibly coded as from another era, and who will return at various crucial points throughout the piece.
At first, based largely on this opening establishment of Mushi no Hoshi's "insect zone," I was wont to see Maro as reinscribing various traditional gender hierarchies--binaries which, in the insect world, don't always pertain in the ways they still unfortunately do among most human societies. But the women will get their revenge on the men, as when, in a stunning sequence involving a series of swooping butterfly nets, the mesh from the nets descends upon the heads of the men. As for Maro himself, he plays an enigmatic and deliberately gender-ambiguous central figure who emerges from a downstage pupa-like sandbox every now and then to show us the successive stages of his transformation--which are only partly, I would argue, about the fluid spaces between male and female. Maro's character will eventually end up inside the central platform dancing a duet with a fearsome and powerfully resistive woman who somehow transcends her apparent sacrificial status, the viscera of her body turned outward on her all-white dress--a scabrous badge of honour, and an indictment, rather than a victimizing wound.
In a show filled with amazing visual tableaux, Maro saves the best for last: the full company, now caked in shiny silver body paint, and with their faces covered by mesh cloths, emerging as a chorus-line, their twisted arachnid-like homogeneity offset by the distinguishing facial self-image that each of them wears around their necks. It's an ending entirely appropriate to the story Maro is telling, but also to butoh as a form: for underneath the white body paint each dancer is encouraged to find and express his or her own distinct movement vocabulary.
P.
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