Female Choreographers Letting Off Steam By ANNA KISSELGOFF Zany or aggressive (often both), the experimental dance scene in Japan can be counted on to spawn four more provocative companies for the annual Japanese Contemporary Dance Showcase in New York.

Dance Company Nibroll, which presented "Coffee," a frenzied metaphor for a rat race with corporate and punk characters, is anything but oblique about the credo in its publicity: "We are the generation that grew up in bedroom suburbs," the company writes. "We do not yearn for Tokyo, and we do not have a hometown."

The dancing is deliberately artless for the child-women in Strange Kinoko ("mushrooms") Dance Company, whose "Frill" looks with irony at a world with plastic lamps shaped like tulips.

Choreographically "Be — Duo Version" for Dance Theater Ludens was the most impressive, with its exploration of physical support. In a striking final image, a man and a woman advance, totally tilted toward one another. Yet more than once the woman's movements evoked rejection of dependence. The stereotype of the submissive Japanese woman in a pretty kimono, trotting behind a man, is of course ancient history for these choreographers. The image is not deconstructed but destroyed by the post-Butoh dancer Akemi Takeya. In a see-through white gown and tossing her mane of bleached-blond hair, she offers a remarkably controlled death rattle of a solo ("Strange Forest") to the roar of an electric cello played onstage by Arnold Haberl. When she finds release, she has seemingly emptied her body of negativity: very Japanese.

It would be easy to see "Be" as the most conventional of the pieces. But as the most "dancey" work, it is the most inventive in exploration of movement. Takiko Iwabuchi, who has worked for several years in Europe, is a choreographer well versed in such post-modern dance techniques as contact improvisation. But when she repeatedly links bodies in surprising ways or uses mutual support in partnering, she does not ape the current vogue for streamlined athleticism. Rather, she reaches for the human source of such physical partnering, itself derived from Asian martial arts. "Be" is thus never a display of technical prowess but the study of a woman, portrayed by Yukari Ota, and a man, Keiichi Otsuka, in an evolving relationship. For better or for worse it brings them into mutual dependence.

"Be" is also a striking study of need and loneliness. Schubert's music in the first half is apt. Takeaki Iwashina's brilliant lighting initially isolates the pair from their surroundings. Mr. Otsuka, bald and in a tank shirt and pants, and Ms. Ota, waiflike but powerful in her dancing, are barely aware of each other.

When she stands, he is often at her feet, his chin nuzzling her instep. She stretches her leg toward his forehead. Her purity in a self-absorbed solo is followed by his concentration in a solo in which he stands rooted, swiftly rotating his head and shoulders.

Yann Tiersen's accordion music brings them together. She is often out of his grasp, but she also lies atop his side as he reclines. At one point he smoothly changes hands as he holds her neck at arm's length and both revolve: a remarkable performance.

Ms. Takeya's "Strange Forest," an excerpt from "Yuragi," is not so gentle. She strives for effect and achieves it, although as a cry of alienation this solo needs more texture.

The Vienna-based Ms. Takeya comes out of the more aggressive school of Butoh, the expressionist genre from Japan that remains rooted to the theme of cataclysm and rebirth. New York has not seen the erotic feminine aspect of Butoh as represented by Charlotte Ikeda, who is based in Paris. Ms. Takeya toured with Ms. Ikeda's company. Here her hissing splayed-hand solo is certainly a woman's dance of angst. Although she moves little, the overall dramatic image is the equivalent of the brutal roaring sound that Mr. Haberl sends out from his cello and an electronic tape.

In "Coffee," Mikuni Yanaihara's choreography, in collaboration with the men and women in her company Nibroll, is swift and harsh. A dehumanized society is evoked from the start by a film that shows an animated figure made up of cubes and running in place. There is also the word "powerful," an explosion and a sci-fi landscape. Three men onstage appear struck in the eye by an invisible object. The real-world equivalent becomes a frenetic office with three women in stylized business suits rushing around with coffee mugs and shoved around by men in punk attire to a cacophony of sound. A contrasting idyllic world is portrayed, ironically, in an animated film with daisies and a floating figure. The women change into flowered dresses, but the tone remains violent. The choreography needs a sharper edge, but its disco-drive energy was admirably rendered by the cast.

The audience oohed when a suspended tree of lamps lighted up in "Frill." The Strange Kinoko company affects a naïve style, and its mock worship at a plastic altar by five women waddling in athletic shoes to pop music seemed to say everything in its first five minutes. Yet Chie Ito's choreography is sly, growing more complex, and turns into perceptive social commentary. Besides Ms. Ito, the dancers were Masako Ide, Satomi Yamada, Masayo Sato and Kayoko Iida.

Fuente: The New York Times
Febrero 2003