DANCE REVIEW : 3 SEGMENTS OF ‘LIGHT’

Like the great blues composers, Japanese choreographer Kei Takei condenses human experience into formal rituals of pain heavy with the weight of time.

Takei’s Moving Earth company last visited Los Angeles in 1979, and today the pitiless rigor and repetition that some people found intolerable in her work six years ago cannot be avoided in American modern dance. Everyone from Twyla Tharp (in “Fait Accompli”) to Molissa Fenley (in “Hemispheres”) has aimed for the severe compression, the sense of not merely depicting but physically testing endurance, that once provoked such controversy in Takei’s “Light” series (begun in 1969).

As a result, Takei’s three-part program at the Japan America Theatre on Friday seemed utterly mainstream in its preoccupations. Yes, the cyclical task-structures of “Light, Part 18” did tax one’s attention span, but Laura Dean has ventured more extended reiterations without sending Angelenos fleeing into the night. Yes, the men’s diving-sprawling trio in “Light, Part 11” did look punishing, but even these hardy Takei dancers might flinch from the hazards of Pina Bausch’s “Bluebeard.”

Far from the structuralist dance haiku for which Takei is famed, “Part 18” (1983) turned out to be a stylized dance-drama about labor, complete with a capitalist oppressor and downtrodden masses.

The action suggested the endless drudgery and social bonding of work along with the rivalry of exploiters. As Richard J. Lane fenced in the stage with poles, Roberto Caraballo rolled up blankets or carpets into bundles to be borne by six others. Takei’s own bundle, however, was her 10-month-old son, Raishun, making an unscheduled theatrical debut.

At one point, a scowling Lane set the beat of group activity by shaking a sack (of coins? gambling chips?) and rhythmically hissing--excessive even as agitprop. In contrast, the primitivist rites of “Part 11” (1976, danced locally in 1979) blended a prosaic task--bagging stones--and expressions of group solidarity with greater subtlety. Here, the alternating and then interacting units of men and women, the thrusting-stamping movement achieved a powerful pulse that needed no quasi-narrative or sloganeering.

The premiere of “Light, Part 20” found Takei dancing an improvisational solo full of wistful, childlike gestures and passages of explosive rolling-kicking-falling action. Evoking both the hope and helplessness of youth, this solo ended and, one by one, her company members assembled in the orchestra pit to speak of this new work--as if it took place in the distant past.

“Sure I remember it,” one dancer commented. “She was dealing with the passage of time . . . an incredible turning point in her career. The rest, of course, is history.”

“I’ve forgotten a lot, I guess,” another confessed. And, finally, “If there was no memory, there wouldn’t be any time.”

With that the dancers turned to face an empty stage and sat to watch a dance--the one already danced, already a memory. . . .

Of course, Takei’s concept depended on words more than movement, but “Part 20” did make human experience feel as ephemeral as philosophers have always told us it is. Indeed, its implications would deserve extended consideration--if it had not been already discussed at length in these pages on May 27, 1985--a long time ago.