DANCE REVIEW : Ohno’s Solo ‘Argentina’ a Tour de Force

From its beginning in the late 1950s, the Expressionist contemporary Japanese dance-theater idiom called butoh has remained obsessed with isolating emotional states. Kazuo Ohno remembers: He co-founded butoh with the late Tatsumi Hijikata and, at the Japan America Theatre on Saturday, recreated a 16-year-old classic, “Admiring La Argentina.”

Directed by Hijikata, this 70-minute solo tour de force found the 87-year-old Ohno wearing dead-white makeup and (most of the time) antique gowns for character studies simultaneously distorted and illuminated by butoh priorities.

Many of the drag vignettes highlighted glamour and theatrical illusion with strong overtones of the macabre, creating something like an amalgam of M. Butterfly, the Spider Woman and Norma Desmond. The sense of a transvestite waxworks-in-decay grew strongest perhaps during ghostly slow-motion dances memorializing La Argentina, a great flamenco star of the 1920s and ‘30s.

The final tango of this sequence contrasted steps and poses conveying the artifice of performance with glints of the loss of control and eventual collapse awaiting La Argentina and, of course, Ohno himself. When an 87-year-old dancer stumbles, the moment is definitely double-edged. The repeated use of Maria Callas recordings also conjured nostalgia mixed with a sense of loss.

Elsewhere, however, Ohno could vividly and even daintily evoke a lifetime of feelings and fantasies through a superbly executed gesture or glance--fingers pulled tight against the body, perhaps, or a contorted, sad smile. In one scene, he wore only makeup, shoes and black shorts, standing under an intense shaft of light and reaching up into it, fingers spreading and his legs rocking slightly as if he felt dizzy from the glare.

Yearning for the infinite, physically incapable of embracing it, he embodied the human predicament at its most profound.