Skill Surpasses Creativity of Japanese Artists

In contrast to the butoh artists who immerse and often negate themselves in movement processes akin to cycles of nature, most of the Japanese contemporary dancers on view at the Japan America Theatre on Thursday were intent on displaying their fancy technical skills, haircuts and wardrobes in showpieces built from striking discontinuities.

Packaged by AN Creative, a Tokyo-based dance producer, for a two-week North American tour, this restless, glamorous “New Generation of Soloists and Choreographers” had prowess to burn but relatively little to say.

Wearing a diaphanous jacket with iridescent lining, Kota Yamazaki looked like an exotic tropical fish in the superb liquid undulations of his “Shakuri” solo, with the more conventional modern dance challenges later on (high-speed kicks and dodges, long-held balances in extension) showing him equally accomplished.

In her “Peace of Mind” solo, Kazco Takemoto personalized a very conventional, even reactionary, modern dance vocabulary with a watchful, womanly sensibility all her own. Shinji Nakamura’s “I Wanna Go Home” for Natural Dance Theatre gave Mako Kawano a number of whimsical theater-games involving partial concealment by a wing-curtain, but never topped its opening image: red shoes moving under their own power.

Yoshihiro Matsuyama’s downbeat “Escape on the Cutting Board” represented a kind of modernist final exam for four members of Company Resonance, testing their ability to execute sleek stretches and extensions in one sequence, their mastery of high-velocity gymnastics in another, their talent for repetitive, mundane movement-tasks elsewhere. Did it convey a sense of forces beyond the dancers’ control? Perhaps, but nothing so grand as destiny: merely oppressive, arbitrary movement choices.

Preoccupied with the changing of clothes, including the transformation of golden chair-covers into grotesquely long skirts, Sakiko Ohshima’s “Mask . . . and Confession” depended on the fabulous stamina of five women from H. Art Chaos--especially Naoko Shirakawa in the periodically topless lead role.