DANCE REVIEW : Japan Troupe’s International Profile

When the Contemporary Dance Assn. of Japan first visited North America three years ago, it presented works drawn from Japanese traditional culture. The movement qualified as modern dance, but the literary and thematic contexts of each work belonged to older realities.

That all changed Wednesday when the Assn. returned to the Japan America Theatre. This time, the program trumpeted its internationalism with a lieder ballet and a tango dance-drama--plus feminist statements throughout the evening.

In “Mother Earth,” Rina Atsumi attempted a large-scale, Mahler-driven life cycle, with 16 excellently trained dancers projecting lots of surge but little depth. The lack of weight in her balleticized vocabulary undercut many of her insights about the human condition, but an artful woman’s trio displayed a talent for body sculpture that might have yielded a simpler, more successful work.

With her strong articulations of back, Sachiko Koike became an anomaly among the jeteing corps. But her strangeness proved welcome in a work with plenty of inventive entrances and exits, but no convincing core of expression.

Filled with exciting ideas that it failed to develop or integrate, Kaoru Ishii’s “Transformation” would have been better as three separate pieces. It began and ended as minimalist movement-theater: anonymous dancers moving and toppling piles of wooden boxes.

Next came the bold juxtaposition of corps dancing and pantomime vignettes: five women executing formal choreographic passages versus two women and a man defining relationships through emotional/gestural tableaux. Finally, those three explored their needs and conflicts in solos and apache-style duets emphasizing the man’s selfishness and confusion.

As the dependent, abused woman in green, Yumi Ishimaki made every twitch and sprawl reveal multiple levels of victimization. Astor Piazzolla tangos intercut with the mournful instrumental textures of Kaoru Abe accompanied this intriguing, inventive but ultimately overloaded treatise on sexual politics.

With its vigorous Japanese folk drumming and distinctive straw hats (a circle folded sharply down on each side of the head), Takashi Nishida’s love duet “A Windy Day for Souls” came from an entirely different world. The blend of native positional motifs with academic modern-dance extensions also created a unique movement flavor--though the piece never clearly explained (to non-Japanese, anyway) why the relationship it depicted ended unhappily.

This problem scarcely mattered, however, whenever Ikue Zaike made the work’s sustained tests of balance into declarations of spiritual purity. As in the 1988 program, dancing of the highest quality gave Contemporary Dance Assn. of Japan a stature that its choreography alone would never earn.