DANCE REVIEW : Questions in ‘She’ Focus on Callas

When the body is dropped, the spirit is liberated. But what about the body? What if the process isn’t completed? What keeps it unfinished? What is the process?

These were questions raised, it seemed, by Mitsuyo Uesugi in “She” (Kanojo), by far the more successful of two solos on the “Butoh: Voices of the Soul” program Saturday at the Japan America Theatre. The other was Uno Man’s “Megami-N--The Eyes of Nemesis” in its world premiere.

“She” honorably continued the recent diva-in-decline focus of Uesugi’s great teacher, Kazuo Ohno, in his eerie meditation on the Spanish dancer La Argentina, which was seen locally in 1993. Here, the diva was Maria Callas, heard in Puccini’s “Vissi d’Arte” and Proch’s florid “Variations on ‘Deh Torno Mio Ben.’ ”

*

It was inevitable to think of Callas and the sad ending of her career and life. With superb physical control, Uesugi collapsed slowly, infinitely slowly, as if aging, only to revive at the faint sounds of the soprano’s voice and re-enact as possible in a tortured, decrepit body magical moments on stage. Art calls us back to life.

But only temporarily.

The larger process was inexorable. Uesugi was buffeted by hurricane forces we could see by their effects on her and perceive otherwise only as distorted fragments of Bach chorales. And then? Eventually, the spirit emerged in the traditional image of a butterfly. The butterfly metamorphosed into a ribbon, and the ribbon was pinned into a little girl’s hair. A new cycle began.

Man’s work showed us tombstones and spirits, a man literally at the end of his rope, innumerable deceptive endings and an encyclopedia of Eastern religious rituals. Despite all that, it remained essentially superficial and conceptual, fatal flaws in a work aspiring to the darkly powerful art of butoh.