Sankai Juku returns to BAM with UMUSUNA: MEMORIES BEFORE HISTORY (photo by Jack Vartoogian)
UMUSUNA: MEMORIES BEFORE HISTORY
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
October 28-31, $25-$75, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.sankaijuku.com
Japanese Butoh troupe Sankai Juku has returned to BAM for the first time since 2006 with another meditative work of breathtaking beauty, Umusuna: Memories Before History. As the audience enters, sand is slowly spilling out of a pair of glass cones onto scales hanging at the rear corners of the stage, immediately evoking the passage of time, of life and death, concepts that are central in the oeuvre of company director, choreographer, designer, and performer Ushio Amagatsu, who founded the group forty years ago. As the eighty-minute piece, which is divided into seven sections, opens, Amagatsu, wearing the traditional Sankai Juku costume of a white sheet folded over the lower half of his body, his bald head, arms, and bare chest covered in white powder, makes his way down a narrow path between two long, rectangular, sand-covered mats, toward a waterfall-like stream of sand at the back, beginning his journey of birth. In another vignette, the path turns blue and the background green, as four dancers reach out to the would-be river, as if lost in the wonder of human creation. And in a third section, Sho Takeuchi, Ichiro Hasegawa, Akihito Ichihara, and Semimaru wear corsets, red skirts, and dangling earrings, the path now red and running up the back wall, portraying the female spirit. Over the course of the show, the dancers, which also include Dai Matsuoka, Norihito Ishii, and Shunsuke Momoki, emerge from fetal positions, cry silently up at the sky, crawl across the sand, and swirl in circles as they experience the elements of fire, water, air, and earth. The seven parts of the work have such poetic titles as “All that is born,” “Memories from water,” “In winds blown to the far distance,” and “Mirror of forests” and are set to unfortunately trite New Age-style music by Takashi Kako, Yas-Kaz, and Yoichiro Yoshikawa. There is faster movement and more color than in such previous Sankai Juku pieces as Hibiki (Resonance from Far Away) and Kagemi: Beyond the Metaphors of Mirrors, which provide pleasant breaks from the troupe’s usual agonizingly slow choreography and black, gray, and white hues. Even their bows, during several curtain calls, were performed with gorgeous skill and grace, and even a few hints of smiles.