By Cecily Feltham
Daily Bruin Contributor
A woman who saw Sankai Juku on tour in 1986 said, "It was
fantastic. I fell asleep".
She wasn’t being sarcastic. Intense and weird and slow and
excruciating are all words that have been used to describe Sankai
Juku. So her reaction was strangely normal to this five-man
performance troupe from Japan whose chosen dance form, butoh, seems
to thrive on contradiction.
The company and its newest creation, "Yuragi," will be coming to
the Wiltern Theater this Friday and Saturday. With a credit in the
program that reads "Elevated Rabbit by Natsuyuki Nakanishi," it
promises to be as startling and bizarre in props and movement as
some of their earlier work. Past performances have involved
peacocks and bagpipes, as in "Kinkan Shonen," and fake blood in "To
the Motif of Silence," which flowed from the ears of director Ushio
Amagatsu as he stood in a frozen scream. "Yuragi," which is
translated to "in a space of perpetual motion," features the
aforementioned rabbit, floating dancers and a sea of sand.
Judy Mitoma, the chair of UCLA’s World Arts and Cultures
department, says she loves both Sankai Juku’s use of the strange
and its effects.
"We spend all of our time trying to make things nice," Mitoma
says of American culture. "We spend all of our time covering up. We
don’t want to see naked bodies, to see death, to see fat people in
bathing suits … to see grotesqueness is not something people
choose to see. Those people are kept in hospitals, in rest homes.
We don’t integrate people who move this way normally into our
everyday lives." She pauses. "It makes us uncomfortable."
But it’s not just the deformed images that are disturbing. It’s
also the time it takes to perform them. Lots and lots and lots of
time. That’s not to say that the show is excessively long (it
consists of seven ten-minute pieces with no intermission)but that
some movements are performed at a painstaking speed. Mitoma, who
will present a 30 minute CenterStage Lecture an hour before
curtain, says that such slow motion is not unusual for Asian work.
She gives the example of Japanese tea ceremonies and says, "You can
see that some Japanese activities insist that you suspend your
sense of time" in order to let particpators and observers
transcend.
So why does a person pay to be uncomfortable, to get more and
more agitated wondering how long it will take for the bald, nearly
naked white-powdered butoh dancer to achieve his ultimate pose?
Because there is a prize for patience. As the viewer sits there,
explains Mitoma, the process alters the mind and the soul, takes
someone to another plane of existence, forces her to rethink what
dance and theater are and what one human being can communicate to
another.
"You’re in another state of time and place  it’s a
transcendental state, not a bored state," she explains. "We’ve all
been there, when we’re in a theater and have to just close our eyes
and think, ‘Well, at least I’ll get some rest.’ But this is
different." Mitoma’s students consistently tell her that they
changed after seeing butoh and that it made them more serious
artists.
Perhaps the best way to describe Sankai Juku’s dancing and butoh
isn’t by a motion, but by a feeling. Mitoma, who considers Sankai
Juku an "exemplor of the outstanding work of butoh," thought of her
nephews when trying to describe the effect of the dance. She was
sitting with them, both prematurely born and exquisitely small,
watching them for hours, when all of a sudden she realized that she
had experienced that sensation before. "It was butoh", she says.
"It was so innocent, so pure. Sankai Juku are about essence. It’s
like a memory that we have  it’s like an ancient
understanding. These guys are at the beginnings of the human
experience."
Butoh began in the 60s, some say as a reaction to the bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagaskai. It is a way of life, a dedication, and "a
communal, philosophical, emotional commitment" that was exemplified
when troupe member Yoshiyuki Takada died during a performance on
Sept. 10, 1985, bringing their second North American tour to an
abrupt end. "They work on the edge. The kinds of risks they take,
it’s like stuntwork", says Mitoma. "But when I say ‘on the edge’, I
don’t want to limit it to just the physical meaning  it’s
social, too."
The last words of advice Mitoma has for those excited and
planning to attend is, "Stick it out and work with it and get into
it and then, you’ll transcend it."
PERFORMANCE: Sankai Juku will perform Friday
and Saturday at the Wiltern Theater. For more info, call (310)
825-2101.