Slow and steady, Sankai Juku is unforgettable
With their death-white body paint, bald "Nosferatu" pates and taloned hands, the dancers of Sankai Juku will never give a children's matinee.
Their nightmare personas, alternately inspiring fear and pity, are the signatures of butoh, an agonized, intensely ritualistic movement style evolved by the Japanese as a reaction to their country's decimation by World War II.
Saturday, the Pittsburgh Dance Council answered Pittsburghers who complain that our metropolis is a doormat for endless touring productions of "Riverdance." To experience this most avant garde of performances at the Benedum was a little like reading "The Red Wheelbarrow," a poem by William Carlos Williams that goes So much depends upon/a red wheel barrow/glazed with rain water/beside the white chickens.
You like it, even though you might have no idea why.
The troupe performed "Hibiki: Resonance from Far Away," the latest work by Sankai Juku and founder Ushio Amagatsu. Performed in six parts, it was alternately frightening, ethereal and ultimately life affirming, particularly the final part, titled "Toyomi: resounding More Light!" As the quintet stood in apricot trimmed robes, each cupping a moonbeam, their palms were imprinted with stigmata of light. If you were one of those fortunate enough to be close enough to read their facial expressions, you felt a sunburst of empathy inside your solar plexus.
Most dance uses movement punctuated with pauses. With Sankai Juku, it's the other way around. The six-part "Hibiki" was one long, resounding pause, marked by movements that almost always stayed above the waist: taloned hands, a bird-like dip of the arm, a slow undulation of raised arms that gave three of the dancers the appearance of sea anemones moving underwater.
The five dancers performed on a sand-covered stage. Four hanging quartz pendants dripped water into four of 13 large, shallow glass bowls that were arranged in parenthetical formation. To the slow cadence of dripping water, the five dancers rose from fetal positions, like long-dead mummies coming to life. Slowly, they stood, forming a Stonehenge of bodies. Throughout the evening, they used their striking, white and sexless bodies to create some striking images.
In "Utsuri: Displacement," a trio of dancers moved in a slow, burdened procession, their lower bodies hidden by gathered purple silk. They appeared to be half-hewn sculptures, their torsos emerging from raw stone.
The most disturbing tableau came during a section titled "Outer Limits of the Red." As a thunderous industrial soundtrack clanged and clanked, four androgynous figures in long white skirts, red-laced corsets and drop-ball earrings raked their hands over a glass bowl like a coven of witches from "Macbeth." They opened their mouths in disturbing black O's — the vaunted "silent scream" of the butoh underworld — as their fingers spidered down their other arm.
You might have found the performance tedious or moving. You might even have had a sudden urge for powdered donuts. But you're not likely to forget Sankai Juku. If you've never seen stones grow, well, now perhaps you have.
