Kasai Explores the Reaches of Performance in ‘Seraphita’

In “Seraphita” Saturday at the Japan America Theatre, Akira Kasai traced a map of every place he’s been in his 52 years--plus some destinations on the horizon.

Over 100 minutes, Kasai often drew on his mastery of butoh, the neo-Expressionist Japanese idiom he helped pioneer in the 1960s. Sometimes, though, he seemed closer to European mime and modern dance traditions: a reminder that he left butoh in 1979 to study eurythmics in Germany, returning to the Japanese avant-garde only in 1994.

Moreover, much of “Seraphita” proved unpredictably exploratory, with Kasai prowling every foot of the stage, along with parts of the auditorium, testing nearly every truism about the act of performance--including the assumption that self-indulgence is always a sin.

Punctuated by sculptural movement by Yoshie Ishii and Akiko Nishisaka, “Seraphita” essentially amounted to a rambling Kasai solo crowned by exquisite hand imagery and energized by his spoken meditations on the death of things. “When this dance is over,” he warned, “the end of the world will come.”

Nearly nude, increasingly anguished and always intent on transforming personal processes of change into a cosmic odyssey, Kasai might be considered a spiritual twin of dance-based performance artist Tim Miller (at Highways the same night). Both are breakthrough artists trapped in some ways by the new forms they helped create--and both are magnificently subversive presences in the theater.