Eastern Traditions Mix With American Jazz Movements in Keiko Fujii’s ‘Yamato’

As a Japanese dance student new to Honolulu, Keiko Fujii had a strange feeling of deja vu when she first saw American break dancers rotate their shoulders in slow motion .

“Wow,” she remembers thinking, “that’s Noh movement.”

A choreographer who can see a connection between a highly stylized 600-year-old theatrical form and children’s sidewalk high jinks in the TV age might be expected to approach her craft in an unabashedly eclectic way.

In her lavishly costumed “Yamato,” to be performed tonight in downtown Los Angeles at the Japan America Theatre as part of Japan Week L.A. 1988, Fujii isolates moments from the panorama of Japanese history with a series of dances incorporating elements of jazz, ballet, modern dance and Noh actors’ movements. Named after Japan’s first court, “Yamato” marks the West Coast debut of the Osaka-based, all-woman Keiko Fujii Dance Company.

The first portion of the piece begins with an agrarian idyll set in the 3rd Century BC and segues to Japan’s Heian period (8th to 12th-Century), a period of great aristocratic luxury and power, the rise of the warrior class and the emergence of a Japanese form of Buddhism. The second portion explores Japan’s emotional climate immediately before, during and after World War II.

Last year, when “Yamato” was performed in New York, it was 2 1/2 hours long, employed Fujii’s entire 23-member company and came under critical fire from some quarters for being diffuse and uneven.

Since then, Fujii has pared the work down to 1 1/2 hours, cut the cast down to 13 (the better to accommodate small stages), eliminated some subsidiary themes and reworked the individual pieces to give them, she says, “deeper meaning.”

The score--formerly a mixture of American jazz recordings and John Kaizan Neptune’s compositions for traditional Japanese instruments--is now entirely crafted by Neptune, an American living in Japan, and will be played live by his six-member Tokyosphere group.

But the full-blown stagecraft Fujii believes essential to dance remains a constant in “Yamato.” As she describes it, the movement, music, costumes (by fashion designer Hideko Sugai), scenery (by Ikuyo Shimada), lighting and even the theater and audience should all “breathe” together.

Interviewed in her Los Angeles hotel room a few days before the performance, the petite 33-year-old choreographer with the boyish haircut and theatrically made-up eyebrows wrestled valiantly with a slippery English vocabulary.

Gracious and reserved in the Japanese manner (excusing herself and giggling with a hand over her mouth when she said the word “sex”), Fujii nevertheless boldly proclaimed her lack of attachment to her roots.

“People think I’m a modern dancer from Japan, right?” she asked rhetorically. “I don’t have that feeling. I’m Keiko Fujii”--she laughed at her un-Japanese audacity--”I don’t care where I’m from or anything.”

Actually, it was only after spending several years living in the United States that she began to appreciate her country’s culture.

The daughter of a teacher of traditional Japanese dance, Fujii rebelled at the discipline of her mother’s classes and was finally sent to take modern dance instead. In 1980, after teaching primary school and choreographing in her free time, she went to Honolulu to study with Betty Jones, a member of Jose Limon’s original company. A year-and-a-half later, Fujii formed her own jazz dance company, Superdancers.

In 1985, when her American husband wanted to move to Japan for career reasons, she regretted having to return. But she decided to open a studio in Osaka and form a company. “Yamato” stems from the growing engagement with Japanese history that Fujii has felt in recent years.

“If we understand history, we can see how we should live in this world . . . . The more I study, the more I feel the weight, the very heavy pressure on my shoulders,” she said, touching them. “Sometimes I feel the energy of the people, very strong and high all the time--like during the 12th Century, when they were strong inside even though they were poor.”

“Genso,” one of her solos in “Yamato,” weaves together tantalizing bits of knowledge about the life of the emotionally uncontrolled Queen Himiko, a ruler of ancient Japan who kept herself walled away from her subjects and believed mirrors symbolized the sun.

In a paper she wrote about the mysterious queen, Fujii remarked that the reason so little is known about her “lies in the fact that her life deviated too greatly from (womanhood) and furthermore from the life of a human being.”

But despite the feminist point of view that a Westerner might perceive in “Yamato,” which contrasts strict unison movements of powerful men (danced by women) with sympathetic treatments of individual women, Fujii resists the feminist label.

Even the absence of men in her company, she said, is due to the weakness of Japanese men’s technique, which she regards as inferior to that of American dancers. At the mention of butoh-- Japan’s contemporary stylized dance-theater form, in which males have demonstrated extraordinary intensity--she admitted she doesn’t care for it because “most of it doesn’t say anything to me.”

Although American contemporary dance is Fujii’s great touchstone (she never goes to dance concerts in Japan but attends them frequently in New York, she said), even when her dancers’ bodies are moving in American ways, the positioning of their hands appears distinctively Japanese.

“Our hands tell our thoughts,” she said, rubbing hers together. “They have a warmth. Dancing is not only for the feet and the body.”

But in the next instant, Fujii was quick to note the universality of hand language. “You don’t say, ‘I love you’ like this”--she said, turning her palms outward and making an unconvincing hugging motion.

“In any dance you’ve got to have a centering inside of your body and inside of your mind, also. I think that’s the root of dancing. Basically it is the same because we are all human beings.”