Dance : Ninagawa Co.: 2 Versions of ‘Komachi’

Twice-told tales can be doubly fascinating in the theater, whether you’re comparing different performers in the same role or watching a new version of an antique masterwork.

In its West Coast debut Friday at the Japan America Theatre, the Ninagawa Company of Tokyo offered both these experiences, juxtaposing two depictions of the legendary Ono-no-Komachi, a Kyoto poet of the 800s famed for her beauty and cruelty.

In the first half of the program, Motoi Hanayagi danced a solo in traditional style that summarized many of the events in “Sotoba Komachi,” a classic Noh dance-drama of the 14th Century. Although mournful and resonant Noh chant accompanied part of the solo, choreographer Kinnosuke Hanayagi III retold Komachi’s story in a later, bolder idiom more associated with the Kabuki.

Here, traced in dance-gesture of pitiless clarity, we saw an aged and nearly crippled woman reminiscing about her youth. Whether stroking gray hair with quivering fingers or re-experiencing a moment in the past through stamping, swiveling footwork ending with a sudden collapse, Motoi Hanayagi created a timeless archetype.

After intermission came Yukio Ninagawa’s visionary staging of a radically updated interpretation of “Sotoba Komachi,” written by novelist Yukio Mishima in the early 1950s. This time, a grotesquely cronelike Komachi (Haruhiko Joh) scavenged cigarette butts in a modern Tokyo park, remembering--as in the danced version and the Noh play--a doomed lover of long ago.

Hearing her story and, eventually, fatally ensnared by it, a young poet (Norihiro Inoue) gave added poignancy to this partly ironic but also seductively dreamlike meditation on the fleeting nature of youth, beauty, love and life itself. (The fact that Inoue is considered one of the great beauties of the Japanese stage reinforced this theme through contrast with Joh’s stylized ugliness).

Strafed with light from every direction, Kaoru Kanamori’s set design created a dark refuge of green leaves and crimson blossoms where everyone from lovers to vagrants gathered to escape the city’s glare.

Ninagawa heightened the strangeness by inspired adaptations of Noh and Kabuki stagecraft: an all-male cast (including those couples sensually necking on park benches), startling scenic transformations (achieved with the fall of a curtain) and, especially, the constant, ominous, audible fall of blood-red flowers (replacing the drums that punctuate Noh performances).

With Hanayagi’s dance establishing one way of telling the Komachi story, Mishima and Ninagawa added layer upon layer of interpretation and commentary that proved lucid and involving even to an audience renting translation headphones for basic data.

The gutsy Joh and the intense Inoue could be seen as distinctive contemporary characters and also as the latest embodiments of a tale from 11 centuries ago. Perhaps this was Ninagawa’s ultimate act of wizardry in an evening of theatrical legerdemain: making everyone feel equally intimate with an ancient, profound cultural heritage.