Celebrating the Force of Gravity

Oguri and the other four members of his Los Angeles-based butoh troupe Renzoku are working on what he calls a salty dance--although at this point, it’s safe to say that many ingredients are involved. From the outside, the process looks slightly more mysterious than the kind of rehearsal in which performers learn and repeat sections of a dance.

Oguri asks each dancer to choose a few movements of the arms and torso. Then he puts on a tape of erratic piano music and watches as they improvise, repeating and varying the phrases. In less than a month, some of these movements may be recognizable in “Effect of Salt,” Renzoku’s contribution to the Fall Ahead Performance and Dance Festival at Cal State L.A.

The score, commissioned from Israeli composer Yuval Ron, will be performed live--a mix of guitar, saxophone and samplings that will be added to the dance about a week before the premiere. But even in final rehearsals, the piece won’t be finished. As the 33-year-old choreographer puts it: “Dance should start to happen between performer and audience.”

What is happening, then, in today’s afternoon rehearsal at La Boca--a chapel converted into performance space in the historic Sunshine Mission/Casa de Rosas complex near USC--is the selection of some raw ingredients. As elbows jut, ribs shift and hands flutter, Oguri wanders around giving directions like a silent movie director--a Japanese director who speaks in truncated English phrases and expressively rich gesture. “Go lower . . . try faster . . . bend knees more . . . now hand to head . . . now tongue out.”

With everyone doing a variation of similar movement in place, Oguri joins in. Compact, bald and instantly riveting, Oguri--as a reviewer during Renzoku’s recent Irish tour noted--makes the purpose of the seemingly random movement vocabulary more clear. His crouched stance is more rooted than the others, his energy an impossible combination of mild and manic. And the way he stretches his tongue up to the sky as he leans back and wavers crazily makes you think that something must be worth tasting.

The other dancers are also bobbing and weaving like puppets, summoning up images of a child tasting a snowflake, a nervous Southern belle, an ecstatic acolyte at Woodstock. The piano on tape continues to pour out fractured chords, adding to the feeling that the inmates are running the asylum.

It’s not always easy for butoh dancers to explain what they do for a living. Roxanne Steinberg, who is Oguri’s wife and a co-founding member of Renzoku, has described their work to outsiders like this:

“I’ll say that it’s a kind of dance that’s very different from ballet. We go with gravity, we’re not defying it--we use gravity very much. And it’s low to the ground, although we jump too.

“We’ll take images sometimes from things that look like your daily life movements, and we’ll slow them way down, or we’ll speed them up. We’ll reflect things in your life that make you look at them in a different way.”

Butoh is a form that developed when Japanese dancers reacted in their own way to German and American modern dance during the post-World War II era of despair and national reevaluation in Japan. Founded by Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata, whose work first inspired Oguri, butoh is by no means a cohesive practice. But generally, it includes the following elements: alteration of time (often very slow), chalky body makeup and a grave concentration that pervades anguished, static or ecstatic movement.

North American dance-goers may be most familiar with the butoh landscape through the work of Sankai Juku, which performed earlier this month at the Wiltern; or Eiko and Koma, who came to both the Japan America Theatre and UCLA last spring.

And for local audiences, Renzoku has been steadily more visible since its formation in 1993. The group has garnered critical acclaim with pieces such as “In Between the Heartbeat,” at the Japan America Theatre last June (for which Oguri did a solo atop a working photocopier); and “Drift,” which unfolded ceremonially in the fountain of California Plaza in August of 1995.

Oguri’s pathway into dance began in the early ‘80s, after he had left his hometown of Nagoya, Japan, for nearby Tokyo, he explains while sitting with Steinberg during a break. The avant-garde fervor of the ‘60s was over, but there was still enough experimentation around to excite an ambitious 20-year-old.

“Of course, I was young,” he says, “so everything was interesting--rock and roll, punk music, jazz. . . . “

At first, he was doing “some kind of visual art,” but he soon discovered Hijikata and butoh. Oguri, who still struggles with English, searches for the words to describe his reaction:

“It was beautiful, but beauty was not . . . not an image of beauty . . . maybe some nostalgia or . . . almost a mental thing . . . almost ugly. Somehow, I said, I can do that too. I felt that kind of passion. I said, ‘I can do that. I really have something inside--yeah, I have the same blood.’ ”

Hijikata recommended that Oguri join Min Tanaka, whose Mai-Juku was expanding to 40 male dancers for the first butoh festival in 1985. Soon, Oguri was involved in intensive workshops with Tanaka, whose training method--called Body Weather Workshop--is now used by Renzoku. The classes include an athletic warm-up; a section called “manipulations,” done in pairs, in which one person guides the limbs of another; and directed improvisations that develop from images.

In Japan, dancing did not provide a living, so Oguri also worked as a manual laborer or a photographer’s assistant before moving to Min Tanaka’s communal farm. For the next five years, dancing there took turns with tending vegetables, rice and chickens. It was on the farm that Oguri met his future wife in 1987.

Steinberg, 35, had been drawn to butoh and Tanaka’s farm when she first saw Tanaka perform, while she was still a dance major at Bennington College. “I was, like, that’s what I do, that’s me! Then I realized, no, I’m working slightly differently,” says Steinberg, who had trained mostly in modern dance. “But I had always worked improvisationally. It’s about really connecting with people at that human level, where you say, ‘Oh, my body wants to do that, I want to move--I can make my mind work my body like that.’ ”

Oguri and Steinberg were married in 1990 and settled in Venice Beach. For the next few years, the couple made dances (alongside then-collaborator Melinda Ring) for programs in venues such as LACE and Highways. Since the birth of their son Zenji 3 1/2 years ago, Steinberg has not choreographed but manages company affairs and shares duties teaching company class with the other dancers--Boaz Barkan, Jamie Burris and Dona Leonard, and, of course, Oguri (who now never uses his first name, Naoyuki).

Steinberg also teaches classes three times a week for the women in transition who are staying at the Sunshine Mission/Casa de Rosas shelter and housing facility. Renzoku is the resident dance company there, which means it gets to use the La Boca studio and performance space, founded by choreographer Sarah Elgart, and in return offers post-performance discussions and free classes for residents. Most of these women don’t know what to expect from a butoh dance class, Steinberg says--they think they might be there “to burn off some fat.”

But she surprises them by working with images that relate to current issues in their lives. She has been gratified by the number of women who tell her that through these movement explorations, they find out things about themselves and about relating to others.

After its Cal State L.A. appearance, Renzoku will do a site-specific piece for Chance: Three Days in the Desert, an art-music-film-word event to be held in Primm, Nev., Nov. 8-10. True to the title, they don’t know exactly when or what they’ll perform, but they know that French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard will deliver a lecture on butoh that weekend. So perhaps Oguri and Steinberg will not have to explain what it is they do.

Asked about the kind of reactions Renzoku usually gets, Steinberg recalls: “A few times people have said, ‘I come to your performances, and I never know what to expect, but it always ends up solving my problems.’ Just making them realize what they were thinking about. I’ve had that a couple of times. That’s what you would hope for.”

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“EFFECT OF SALT,” Cal State L.A. State Playhouse, 5151 State University Drive. Dates: Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m.; next Sunday, 2:30 p.m. Prices: $10-$12. Phone: (213) 343-4118.The Fall Ahead Festival continues with Diavolo Dance Theater on Nov. 1-2, 8 p.m., and Nov. 3, 2:30 p.m. $10-$12.