Lost at Sea

“Ship in a View”
Pappa Tarahumara
Brooklyn Academy of Music
Brooklyn, NY
November 28, 2007

By Lisa Rinehart

Copyright 2007 by Lisa Rinehart

Hiroshi Koike, Artistic Director of Pappa Tarahumara and creator of “Ship in a View,” appears to be a member of the “if it’s inscrutable, it must be good” club. Koike’s ninety-five minute reflection on Hitachi City, the provincial industrial town where he grew up in 1960’s Japan, is often beautiful, but heavily laden with suggested psychodrama that verges on the irritating. This is perhaps because Koike makes the fatal mistake of assuming we care as much about his recollections of Hitachi City as he does. Memory is a funny thing. Intensely subjective, it can be mined with great success for clear emotion and experience, but it can also be an artistic quagmire about as interesting as slides of Mom and Dad’s latest trip.

I am perhaps being too harsh, because there is much to admire in “Ship in a View.” The curtain rises on a huge mast standing center stage, and Koike immediately transports us to a watery grey world in which fog and the sounds of the sea are pierced by a woman’s mournful voice. Her lament feels like a human cry for acknowledgement in a desolate landscape. Blank-faced women drift and sway in unison, scanning the horizon for something felt, but unseen. Kept this abstract, Koike’s imagery conjures the sadness of isolation amidst a group; loneliness he perhaps felt growing up in this grim seaside city largely sustained by an electronics factory.

When Koike tries to suggest stories, however, things begin to go awry. A parade of characters are introduced, but never explained. A girlish dancer totters across the stage eating an apple. A pregnant woman slumps against the mast and wearily rubs her belly, then tries to seduce one of the few men around; laughing and thrusting her belly at him with a wantonness worthy of Pina Bausch’s riper moments, but without the humor. There is much silent screaming from a trio of women dressed in schoolgirl smocks, but no clue as to what they’re distraught over.

Eventually, after sitting enigmatically upstage for most of the performance, a male dancer rises and performs a few of Koike’s sweeping arm movements. The Thorazine haze lifts and there’s a collective surge of running and jumping underscored by the driving thump of machinery. More fog pours forth, the dancers do a lot of aimless laughing, and a there’s a disconcerting sense that Koike is spinning his choreographic wheels. One by one, dancers emerge in silvery versions of their original black costumes and recap Koike’s already unmemorable movement as lines of twinkling clear bulbs descend from the flys. The lights flicker and periodically go out until finally, in what is probably supposed to be the climactic moment, two seated techno-creatures; one topped by a tiny wiggling head, the other with a blank computer screen flopping lazily from side to side, are pulled out and parked like two geezers in front of the nursing home. Does Koike’s malaise with Hitachi City really all come back to poor old mom and dad – dehumanized by-products of Japan’s post-war push for economic recovery? It’s all a little silly.

Koike has a few important things going for him, however. Mariko Ogawa is one of them. Co-founder of Pappa Tarahumara, Ogawa is a tall, exquisite singer/dancer who gives “Ship in a View” its haunting voice. The segments when she is featured are the best of the evening. Another asset is costume designer Koji Hamai. His loose silk smocks are artfully draped and tied to suggest everything from innocence to authority, and are particularly beautiful in their silver incarnations when the dancers’ movements reveal deep chartreuse under layers.

“Ship in a View” isn’t painful to watch. It’s lavishly produced and well performed, but if Koike wants to “change the idea of the conventional arts world in Japan,” as he professes in a 2007 Japan Times interview, then he will have to offer more than an intriguing jumble of ideas culled from dance, drama and music. Editing is an art all its own, and one Koike may want to try his hand at.

Copyright 2007 by Lisa Rinehart

Photos:
Jack Vartoogian