Special Effects a Major Player for Oshima

Like so many movies, music videos, Broadway musicals and other media artifacts these days, the work of Japanese contemporary choreographer Sakiko Oshima remains devotedly enslaved to spectacle and special effects.

Indeed, the two-part program by her 8-year-old company, H*Art*Chaos, at the Japan America Theatre on Tuesday offered a comprehensive index to this end-of-the-century obsession with FX wizardry and rootless pictorialism: billowing smoke and splashing water and flashlight peek-a-boo and giant shadows and trapeze wires and portable set units toted by the dancers and trails of flower petals along the floor--all used as exclamation points within two hours of dancing. No choreographic invention or development to speak of, just things that could be bought.

Oshima’s nine female dancers spent most of the evening as adjuncts to her effects--manipulating screens, cables and furniture--with her excellent lead dancer and company co-founder, Naoko Shirakawa, often functioning primarily as a gymnastic stunt woman. Finally, when Igor Stravinsky’s epoch-defining “Rite of Spring” proved insufficiently effect-laden, uncredited helpers tricked it out with crowd noises and additional music.

From their pulsing lights to the signature use of sprawling, rag-doll motion suddenly pierced by straight-to-the-ceiling ballet extensions (another special effect), Oshima’s “Abyss” and “Rite of Spring” were the same piece: fragmentary glimpses of a lost, initially numb young woman interacting with an oppressive corps and growing increasingly desperate, but still standing at the end. In “Abyss,” Kumiko Kikuchi capably danced the catatonic lady-in-distress, accompanied by music credited to Toshiyuki Ochiai but laced with extensive borrowings from the classical pantheon.

In the “Rite,” Shirakawa danced across more furniture than anyone since Fred Astaire, doing spectacular extensions perched on a bathtub and, later, spinning insanely on a trapeze line, wet to the bone with bathtub water, the spray flying off her in backlit centrifugal cascades. Yes, she proved very, very picturesque and accomplished but never plausibly victimized by the doggedly threatening circumstances of the piece so much as needing the threat to look her best. Jeopardy becomes her, so H*Art*Chaos is definitely the right place for her to remain in reliably constant peril.

The company name: “H*Art” obviously adds up to “heart,” no doubt pointing toward Oshima’s suffering heroines, and “*Chaos” labels all the unexplained discontinuities studiously piled on them. On Tuesday, however, apart from random sound glitches, the only true chaos could be found in the Japan America Theatre will-call line.