JAPAN is a country is that, more than most, has had to face up to the industrial changes and political rigors of the 20th century, a country whose unbridled militarism had to absorb the cataclysmic, tragic lesson of Hiroshima.
One of its many post-war reactions was the development in the early 1960s of a new, highly ritualized dance form, first called ankoko butoh (dance of utter darkness), later shortened to Butoh.
Probably the famous of all Butoh troupes today is Ushio Amagatsu’s Sankai Juku, which has returned to New York, after a three-year absence, with “Hyomeki” (Within a Gentle Vibration and Agitation) at the Opera House of the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Part of BAM’s 1999 Next Wave Festival, the performance starts with vague sounds, like dance music from another room, then to big drum beats as four men, clad in skirt-like draperies – their bald heads and faces totally dusted with white powder to make them look like ancient babies – slowly approach a silver-ringed disc at the center of an otherwise bare stage.
The 90-minute, intermissionless ritual of “Hyomeki” has begun, as slowly and as measuredly as it will continue and end. The silver ring sometimes elevates, sometimes moves to an angle. That’s the main action.
The music, by Takashi Kako and Yoichiro Yoshikawa for piano and synthesizer, is conventional, derivative, unmemorable but not unpleasant. Like the slow dances themselves, it adds to an experience that hypnotically washes over the onlooker’s consciousness.
Amagatsu – responsible for direction, choreography and design – does a couple of leisurely solos, and together with his company passes through vistas of moving statuary, sculptural shapes reminiscent of Disney-like animations of Henry Moore, and images, mostly fetal, of birth and death, of embryos and corpses.
As theater, it makes no intellectual demands, as dance it presents no esthetic problems. You are free to see in it what you wish, and audiences appear to love it.
Why not? It can lull the stormiest heart into passive quietude. It might act something like dance-Prozac.
Opera House, Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Ave.; (718) 636-4100. Tonight at 7:30 and tomorrow at 3 p.m.