Music & Dance Reviews : ‘Galvanic Murmur’ Introduced at La Boca

“Galvanic Murmur,” an utterly mesmerizing piece seen over the weekend at La Boca, has only one negative: that it is not being performed nightly--or, at least, on some continuing basis.

Its protagonist, Naoyuki Oguri, along with Melinda Ring and Roxanne Steinberg, knows that drama made of small moments observed up close can be the most compelling of all. What’s more, the former Japanese rice farmer and soloist with Min Tanaka’s celebrated butoh company knows that the ineffable essence of human experience lies in such drama.

So convincing is he--both as choreographer and performer in this 45-minute piece--that one leaves the Hoover Street Sunshine Mission with a palpable belief that words and narrative and other established symbols of communication are unnecessary for attaining high art.

Still, at the painstakingly built climax of “Galvanic Murmur,” with the three dancers erupting in heavenward shouts, an axiom comes to mind: “Man plans, God laughs.”

At the beginning, which was the finale’s antithesis, they sprawled on the floor--inert, frozen in position, each caught at a different moment of spasm. With scraps of newsprint pasted to their bodies in a poetic montage and smoky black smeared across their eyes and an elastic string pulled tightly from inside their mouths to back of head, they conjured a sense of the victim.

Paul Chavez’s rich sound score, a sustained electronic drone studded with distant intimations of other events, was more than an apt sonic background. It provided a piano tango for the two women, standing semi-coiled around each other, with only their mouths touching. Later, it exulted in a beatific chorale shot through with searing blasts of noise.

Perhaps it was the intimate space of this 100-year-old landmark mission, Los Angeles’ oldest shelter for women, that made the performance unforgettable. Whereas less skilled, less artful dancers do not bear such close scrutiny, these three--especially Oguri, with his shaved head, hairless body and virtuoso technique--do, in excelsis.

Seeing the beads of perspiration glisten in the light, then mingle with the paste and loosen his newsprint so that it fluttered half-free in the air, was a drama all of its own, separate from the stalking, cringing steps that tellingly conveyed the universal challenge life poses.