DANCE REVIEW : Japanese Company Offers 3-Part Program

One expected Contemporary Dance of Japan merely to fill in a historical gap. One would see works of the pioneering modern dance generation that preceded today’s firebrands and iconoclasts, and that would be that. Who would have predicted the accomplished, shattering artistry of dancer Yoshiki Homma, who easily dominated the three-part program Saturday at the Japan America Theatre?

In her 30-minute solo, “A Fox in the Himalayas,” choreographed for her by Koh and Toshiko Fujii, Homma was technically astonishing--clear, secure and apparently at ease in difficult one-legged balances, side-kicks up to her ear or a series of split jumps.

But more impressive was her intense, dramatic projection. She was compeling even when she was motionless--crouched in a corner, for instance--as bars of traditional Tibetan music played.

“Fox” is an abstract depiction of isolated mountain life. It is severe and formal in its restricted, linear floor patterns and repetitions of step sequences. There are cycles within cycles, and the work ends with the same side-stepping moves with which it began.

But Homma made it universal by evoking hardship, loneliness, anger, fear and sensual awakening and abandonment. In the poses derived from Hindu temple carvings, she was meltingly erotic.

Less ambitious was Katsuko Orita’s pastel “Endless Summer,” though it cannily used distancing devices (such as shielding dancers’ faces with wide-brimmed hats) to trace the unfolding remembrance in bitter winter of warm summer days and relationships.

As the couple in black who emerged from the winter-clothed group, Orita and Katsushi Izumi ran through intimacy and comic playfulness to ecstatic memories (danced to the Largo of Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony).

Disappointing, however, was Hiroshi Shoji’s “Koiuta (Song of Madness),” a narrative of a doomed love relationship set to Ryohei Hirose’s atonal Concerto for Shakuhachi (bamboo flute).

With its women’s corps stifling silent screams and its bare-chested, oppressive men’s corps, among other elements, the work looked like a poor cousin to Martha Graham Expressionism. And though, as the doomed woman, Sachiko Koike danced with intensity and refined gesture , Satoshi Masaki proved impossibly lightweight and indifferent as her passive lover.