13th Annual Contemporary Dance Showcase
Japan Society, New York
January 8, 2010
by Tom Phillips
Copyright 2010 by Tom Phillips
Protest and satire have long been leading themes of Japan Society’s annual Contemporary Dance Showcase, even in the last few years when it’s been expanded to include artists from Korea, Taiwan and elsewhere in the east. The general target seems to be the formal constraints of Asian society – over there even more than here, dance is an instrument to subvert the conventional order of things. Sometimes the protest is blunt and obvious, but at its best it is deft and daffy and outrageous.
As usual, the showcase began with a bang – a loud, in-your-face male hip-hop ensemble from South Korea called the Laboratory Dance Project. Their lab experiment seems to be trying to explode out of the gray suits they wear. They begin by pounding their naked hearts underneath their white shirts, as the shirt-tails fall out. They walk on their hands, roll and tumble and flail their limbs, not exactly in sync but all with the same intent. The music switches from a steady pounding to an Arabic wail, and they shed their jackets, then shirts. They charge to the very lip of the stage and teeter on the brink. Later they go all the way and spill out into the aisles. They risk offending but don’t, because we believe in their need to dance their way out of the world they’re stuck in.
Japan’s Company Derashinera attacks social conventions by miming them. Their series of skits began with two men and two women sitting symmetrically around a square table, then one of the men toppling over and sliding to the floor. The response is instantaneous: a look of shock and awe, then a scramble to cover up the body by piling the furniture over it. Later there’s a little ballet for a man and a woman, a table and two chairs, one plate and one spoon. The tussle for possession is conducted politely but in deadly earnest; in the end, the woman wins by conceding the spoon, and slurping the imaginary dinner straight from the plate.
Kitamari, the founder-choreographer of the Japanese group KIKIKIKIKI, is a specialist in unraveling the uptight image of Japanese women. She learned her stuff as a member of the Sennichimae Blue Sky Dance Club, an all-female Butoh troupe that rocked this showcase with a satire on Japanese cuteness in 2005. Now she has an her own all-female group of sorts, a motley crew incorporating non-dancer body types and even one man, who appeared in a black ball gown setting off his muscular upper torso. Her ironic “Omedeto” (meaning “Congratulations”) celebrates the formal duties of Japanese women – battling to perform against a tension so thick that their limbs shake. It ends with a wedding march – a bride bent over in a frozen bow, her face frozen in a mirthless grin, followed by a band playing little toy instruments.
Masako Yasumoto’s “slap, pat, suck” is a familiar battle of the sexes, with the choreographer and her male partner struggling frenetically for dominance. She won on my scorecard, but just for being irresistibly energetic, mischievous and sexy.
The last group on the bill, WCDance from Taiwan, didn’t get to do its thing. For the first time in the 13-year history of the Dance Showcase, U-S Immigration denied their visa applications, on the grounds that they were neither “internationally recognized” or “culturally unique.” Rather than seeing the full company, we saw its two leaders, both American-trained, with excerpts from their piece “Small Songs,” which looked a lot like American-style modern dance. Maybe indeed their company is neither internationally recognized or culturally unique, but what would have been the harm in letting the audience judge? It seems the Asians don’t have a monopoly on uptightness.
Copyright 2010 by Tom Phillips
Photograph of KIKIKIKIKI by Waits