Music, Dance Reviews : A Living Treasure at Japan America

Wearing a glossy black wig, her face powdered white, Japanese National Living Treasure Fujima Fujiko wanders onto the stage of the Japan America Theatre as if sleepwalking or blind. Paralyzed by suffering, she pauses, staggers, trembles--then suddenly notices the orange robe folded across one of the shoulders of her exquisite black kimono.

That robe belonged to the dead lover of Yasuna, the character Fujiko portrays, and throughout this classic Kabuki-dance solo it assumes a life of its own. Showing the extremes of Yasuna’s grief though this garment, Fujiko holds it as if a living being still wears it, puts it on over her clothes, carefully arranges it on the floor and momentarily ignores it as she numbly walks away.

At 85, Fujiko dances as if each gesture, pose, transition holds some ultimate secret--there are no minor moments. She also heads a Kabuki-dance dynasty, one represented at this Saturday performance by Fujima Rankei (her daughter) and Fujima Rankoh (one of her grandsons). Also participating: two distinguished Japanese-American teachers who have been granted the performing name of Fujima.

Titled “The Art of Dance,” Fujiko’s program begins with genre portraits: evocations of a specific time and place. First Fujima Chiseye dances “Shinkyoku Urashima,” in which deft manipulations of a fan suggest billowing flames, rippling waves and oars moving though water.

Soon we see the elegant Rankoh impersonate a seller of tops in “Koma,” with the dance taking the form of a toy demonstration but becoming increasingly virtuosic. Unexpectedly, a magical set and costume change transforms Rankoh into the top, the dancer spinning smoothly on the blade of a giant sword.

In “Hane no Kamuro,” Rankei shows us a giddy young girl playing shuttlecock and other games. But though her dance emphasizes artlessness, it very artfully creates images with the cluster of ribbons attached to the dancers’ kimono: They become both a pen and the scroll that pen writes upon, as well as being plucked, one by one, like petals of a daisy.

If the pleasures of the so-called real world dominate these solos, mercurial mental states shape both Fujima Fujiko’s “Yasuna” and “Shizu no Odamaki,” in which Fujima Fujisumi portrays a court dancer who lets her personal feelings color a rigorously formal command performance. Manipulation of enormous sleeves helps unify the solo, along with the refined use of a fan common to the whole program.

Danced to recorded accompaniment, “The Art of Dance” nobly exemplifies the continuity of tradition in Japanese art as well as the inimitable purity of such senior artists as Fujima Fujiko. Trained by the icons of the 19th Century, she brings their legacy to the dawn of the 21st as if our own epoch never existed.