MUSIC & DANCE REVIEWS : ‘Back of Self’ Helps Raise Consciousness

At the end, Naoyuki Oguri and Melinda Ring return to the beginning: They are Adam and Eve, naked except for a sheath of strategic cover, each of them devouring a shiny white onion, crying, sweating, releasing its pungent fumes to the audience.

This latest piece, “Back of Self (Front of Me),” unveiled, so to speak, Sunday at Highways could suggest the above-named biblical characters.

He, a Yul Brynner without eyebrows, and she, a Venus on the Half Shell, show us an unidealized Garden of Eden, a place where revelations are more painful than history allows--but also wry and even funky (a rhythm-and-blues number plays in the background).

Ascribing such a scenario to the Butoh-derived work of Oguri and Ring is hardly central to appreciating it, however. One does not need this, or any story line, to be fully absorbed in the moment of their odyssey.

As they detail it--in micro-movements so undiscernible each by itself that a viewer can only note starting and ending positions--human contact is like electrical current crackling from one being to another.

It does not require language or other forms of acknowledgment. Nor does it govern the body in a conventionally expressive mode. The images are devoid of emotional states as we know and judge them.

Yet there are clues, if one chooses to apply them. Hovering behind a white door that opens onto a black bearing wall Ring is dressed in a black gown and Oguri lies under her feet in the threshold. A faintly heard, scratchy 1930s recording of a soprano singing an Italian aria seals the snapshot.

The next scene is an apparent update, with movements speeded up and magnified to match the progressive jazz riffs, while another sequence, in silence, is a punishingly long repetition of self-flagellation with Oguri rolling back and forth on the ground and Ring whipping her neck up and down--a kind of ritual exorcism.

But for all its potency “Back of Self” doesn’t have quite the integrity of a previous piece, “Galvanic Murmur,” always an implicit risk of collaboration. Too often here one gets pulled away from the small moments of big drama and pointed toward some specific bit of ad hoc arcana.