Music and Dance Reviews : Chic, Empty Butoh at Japan America Theatre

Good grief, butoh has gone chic. With artistic director Tomoe Shizune and his Hakutobo troupe, a new generation of butoh dancers arrived Saturday at the Japan America Theatre, and the new kids on the block just don’t carry the same punch that their elders did.

But don’t blame them. Shizune so overloads them with his own banal New Age score that when, for instance, the impressive Akeno Ashikawa tautly spreads her arms and gesticulates in silent screams, something inside you says, “I know just how you feel.”

Shizune doesn’t have many significant ideas, either. Such previous visitors as the Dai Rakuda Kan company revealed this Expressionist dance-theater art to be a darkly potent protest against materialism and inhumanity.

Their works cut to the bone, managing to suggest paradoxically either a world of devastated, post-nuclear holocaust survivors or a race just barely recognizable as human, as it emerged from some previous state of evolution.

There were no heroes, but there were lots of victims. There were no plots, but nobody needed them. The moment-to-moment power and intensity of the dancers kept audiences riveted.

Although coached by Yoko Ashikawa, a disciple of the great Tatsumi Hijikata, one of the two creators of butoh , these dancers simply aren’t given much opportunity to match that in “Renyo” (“Far From the Lotus”), the fitfully episodic work that dominated the program (and the final part of a trilogy begun by Shizune in 1988).

Interspersed with lots of blackouts and dramatic lighting effects, the four other women of the cast--Uzumi, Mito, Kocho and Shoko, all of whom, in addition to Akeno, take Ashikawa as a stage name--go through prettified motions as mobile manikins. Yes, they occasionally contort their bodies, reach out poignantly or erupt in unheard screams. But these moments quickly pass and they never point toward anything.

The two men in the company, Satahiko Irisawa and Seisaku Kachi, get very little to do except stand, contort and gyrate in spotlights.

In addition to a short opening solo, “Nagareru Kubi” (“Floating Village”), the elder Ashikawa appears as a recurring figure to haunt, inspire or somehow influence Akeno. The younger dancer serves as a focal point in the piece, and demonstrates superb control and a wide range of emotions. She deserves better.

So do all the others. Butoh without soul becomes mere exoticism, and Shizune can’t finesse the issue by serving up pretentious program notes that start like this: “The common perception of ( butoh ) method is that it is something very close to ecriture, as though there is substance which can be received and grasped like a piece of writing.”

Ecriture we might not know, but we can spot a hollow work when we see it.