Connecting Present to an Uncharted Past

In linking ancient traditions with an uncompromising modernity, the locally based Asian and Asian American artists who presented a haunting program titled “Unmapped Zones” at the Japan America Theatre on Thursday had much to teach their audience.

Most of all, these choreographers and performance artists of Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Filipino heritage emphasized the ceremonial: a connection between this moment and occasions stretching back to an uncharted, primordial past. All five pieces represented journeys, whether across a lifetime or in a nightmare.

And nearly everyone savored opportunities for expressive permutations within cycles of repetition.

In her solo “Burning Water,” Hiroko Hojo defined the dangers and triumph of always moving forward into the light--feeling her way at times, being battered by cataclysm and resisting where possible--but eventually, inevitably, resuming her odyssey with dignity and hard-won faith.

“Diwata, Fly” found Dulce Capadocia and members of her Silayan Dance Company reinterpreting Filipino folklore and isolating key themes. The way finger-flutters can bring a bird’s spirit into the human body, for example. Or a sense of the miraculous that occurs when a loop of fabric encircles a dancer in an aura of shimmering color.

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A solo from Karen J. Woo’s “Memoirs of a Scrooge” featured Woo’s own shadow rebelling against her and becoming a monstrous threat: a concept that inspired an excess of generic flail-and-cower emotionalism from Woo but plenty of clever lighting effects from Andrew Milham.

The summit of apocalyptic spectacle, however, arrived with Hae Kyung Lee’s “Voices From the Deep,” in which Stephen Bennett’s smoky sunrise-from-hell and Steve Moshier’s throbbing requiem washed over the stark, skillfully sustained undulations of four dancers who moved inexorably from distant darkness into harsh dominance.

But in kinetic grotesquerie, modern dancers are no match for butoh specialists. So the last word in scary transformations of face and physique came when Oguri and his Renzoku company performed “In Between the Heartbeat,” a commissioned collaboration featuring Hirokazu Kosaka’s patchwork of colored electric blankets as a backdrop and half a dozen copy machines as a major, eerie lighting source.

Naked except for a genital sock, Oguri perched on one of those copiers for an incredible solo in which he seemed to age and even decay--human existence compressed into a horrifying time-lapse lit and photocopied from below with a merciless glare.