THEATER REVIEW : The Dance Artistry of Grand Kabuki

Led by 78-year-old Living National Treasure Baiko Onoe VII, the Grand Kabuki celebrated the 10th anniversary of the Japan America Theatre on Thursday with an unusually short and intimate program of dances.

All three pieces featured opulent costumes that the dancers peeled away to reveal, at the last, robes of brilliantly intense scarlet. Layers of poetic allusion also peeled away in each piece to reveal a molten core--sometimes pure emotion, sometimes bravura technique.

In Baiko’s signature solo, “Fuji Musume,” the pine-and-wisteria setting defined concepts of masculinity and femininity suffusing both the song-texts and dance images. Created in 1826 and revised 90 years later, it offered star dancers the opportunity to achieve high pictorialism, glamour and subtle humor while depicting a woman’s memories of love and pain.

Kabuki, of course, is an all-male idiom, and neither in face nor form could Baiko remotely suggest a delicate maiden. In motion, however, his softness of gesture combined with the gravity of his flow from pose to pose achieved an eerie gender-fusion: Magically, he became both the wisteria and the pine.

In his 1,500th performance of “Fuji Musume,” Baiko also had every element under control--even those moments revealing his character’s loss of control. Unfortunately, his younger colleagues could not always make Kabuki look so effortless elsewhere on the program.

For example, an onstage costume change clearly proved taxing for Manjiro Ichimura II in “Kongen Kusazuribiki,” an episode from a historical epic with its own share of lovelorn memory-dancing. Cast as the embodiment of female restraint opposite the archetypal male flamboyance projected by Tatsunosuke Onoe II, the aristocratic Manjiro invariably glided while the forceful Tatsunosuke invariably stamped.

Bold design elements proved spectacular here, from the view of Mt. Fuji on the backdrop to the checkerboard motifs on both the dancers’ sleeves at the end and on the screen that initially hid them from view. Each of the works Thursday featured onstage musicians but, instead of sitting at the sides, here 15 of them stretched across the back of the stage on two tiers, heightening the sculptural formality of the piece.

In contrast, “Echigo Jishi” pretended to be nothing but popular entertainment: a series of specialty acts performed by an itinerant street dancer. No warrior code. No nostalgia for lost love. No stylized views of nature or femininity. Just the Japan of wooden houses and shops, in front of which you might find a lion-dancer or someone balancing on treacherous, stilt-like, one-cleat wooden clogs.

The someone in this case turned out to be the distinguished Mitsugoro Bando IX, better suited at 64 to the jaunty drum dance early in the piece than the exhausting finale in which he stamped out a rhythmic tattoo on those cleats while swirling two bolts of gauzy fabric overhead.

As artfully detailed in the spoken commentary of Faubion Bowers (heard via rented headsets), “Echigo Jishi” managed to incorporate deft genre sketches within its showpiece structure: evocations of specific places and work activities. In Kabuki, there’s always another layer of meaning or affect, and this exclusive U.S. engagement, through Sunday, invited us again to find the riches beneath the surface.