Taking Aim at Inspiration

In America, couples first fall in love, then get married. In Japan, traditionally, a marriage is arranged and the love grows afterward.

Hirokazu Kosaka says that he and Oguri have something of an arranged marriage.

When Kosaka proposed that he and Oguri join forces artistically three years ago, they knew little about one another. In one respect, the match seemed ideal: Both are Los Angeles performers who hail from Japan.

But Kosaka is an artist and Buddhist priest who practices kyoto, a form of archery that traces its roots to prehistoric Japan. Influenced by Zen Buddhism, it involves ceremony, tradition and meditation.

Oguri is a dancer-choreographer who works in the modern style of butoh, which emerged from post-World War II Japan and shattered dance conventions. It is direct, visceral and anarchic.

The first offspring of this unusual partnership--”In Between the Heartbeat” at the Japan America Theatre on Saturday--is predictably disquieting. The raw materials include 10 working photocopiers, 200 multicolored electric blankets and four intermittently naked dancers. Oh, and several real arrows flying across the stage.

The arrows will pass within a foot of the dancers--close enough to be felt, said Kosaka, who will be wielding the 7-foot bow that launches them.

The title of the piece, in fact, refers to the moment a Zen archer lets an arrow fly. “Just before I release, I’m listening to the heartbeat. If I release it on the heartbeat, the arrow will vibrate.”

Sharing a stage with flying arrows, you might think the dancers would have their routine refined to the inch. Not so. A month before the show, they hadn’t even decided how to arrange the copy machines.

Oguri was not worried. “He shoots target only,” Oguri said of Kosaka.

The other three dancers didn’t look quite as confident.

Rehearsing one afternoon, Kosaka and Oguri work in adjacent rooms of the Japan American Cultural and Community Center in Little Tokyo. Kosaka’s room is the one with the concentric-circle targets on the wall. Oguri’s is the one with the electric blankets on the floor.

Theirs is not the style of stereotypical artistic collaboration: no late nights over coffee, sketches on paper napkins, heads nodding in agreement. It is more like Kosaka created an art installation, then turned it over to Oguri and his dancers.

Besides being a master archer and a Buddhist priest, Kosaka graduated from the prestigious Chouinard Art Institute (which later became CalArts) in 1970. He had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1994 and recently developed the concept for an art installation in the yet-to-open Little Tokyo subway station.

Archery, however, remains central to his life. “It is a destiny for you,” he said. “If you pick up a bow and arrow today, then generations before you have given you that certain thing that caused you to pick them up.” Kosaka was 8 years old when he picked up a bow and arrow, and at 50 he continues to run a weekly kyoto club in Boyle Heights.

Kyoto is completely different from western archery, he said. There is no competitive side to it, no focus on hitting a bull’s-eye. Rather, the focus is on killing one’s self, at least metaphorically, removing ego from the process of shooting. “The bow and arrow have their own spirit. The minute a man puts his own character on it, it destroys that spirit.” When the arrows pierce the stage, they symbolically purify the space.

The electric blanket backdrop of “In Between the Heartbeat” also reflects Kosaka’s sensibilities. It stems from Kosaka’s memory of arriving in the United States at age 10 to live with relatives and learn English. “When I got into bed, the bedding was hot. That shocked me,” he said. “Here was one cloth that could heat you all night.”

Kosaka and Oguri have also discussed at length the notion of borders or, more specifically, that which is not contained within borders. Gray areas. Buffer zones. Dreamscapes. The time in between the heartbeat.

In the performance, the blankets suggest the nocturnal world. The lights from the photocopiers, also Kosaka’s idea, are dreams emerging, and the dancers become those dreams anthropomorphized.

The content of those dreams, however, is up to Oguri.

Asking Oguri what the dance will look like is akin to asking a jazz improviser what notes he’s going to play.

There are a handful of things one can expect from butoh: chalky body makeup, nudity, motions that are sped up or slowed down, intense concentration. Otherwise, expect the unexpected. At the first butoh performance in 1959, a dancer squeezed a chicken between his thighs. That put butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata on the outs with the All-Japan Artistic Dance Assn., and gave butoh its early renegade reputation.

Oguri--who dropped his first name several years ago--met Hijikata in the mid-1980s, and at his recommendation began studying with another butoh artist, Min Tanaka. Eventually Oguri spent five years studying and working on Tanaka’s communal farm, where he met his future wife, Roxanne Steinberg. They were married in 1990, and the next year moved to Los Angeles, where, in 1993, they formed Renzoku.

Oguri resists labeling his work as butoh, which he says died with Hijikata. He doesn’t intend to shock or deal with taboos. Still, Hijikata remains an inspiration, and traces of his influence are visible during an afternoon rehearsal in the JACCC room next to Kosaka’s office.

The bare meeting hall has been transformed into a bizarre romper room, where every inch of the linoleum floor is covered with 40 pastel electric blankets. Sunlight streams in through a wall of windows that look out across the warehouse district.

While jazz music plays loudly, Oguri poses two of the dancers. He pulls the skin above their wrists and elbows, manipulating them like marionettes. They twitch in short spurts, and tug each other’s hair, simultaneously torpid and dynamic. Oguri, his hair buzzed marine-recruit short, squats a few steps back and observes. He removes his oval Armani glasses for a moment and jots in a small notebook.

“He doesn’t tell you what you’re going to be doing. He lets you explore,” said dancer Boaz Barkan.

The company has been probing these photocopier dreams for nearly three years, including a work-in-progress performance in 1996. They continually invent new movements, refine them into dance fragments, and eventually will stitch them together into a full-length work.

Less than three weeks before the performance of “In Between the Heartbeat,” the dancers hadn’t been on top of the copy machines, let alone near the flying arrows. They didn’t have costumes, though Oguri expressed interest in raincoats and the color indigo.

“We’re all going somewhere, but we don’t quite know where yet, so we can’t pack,” said Barkan.

The process doesn’t give the dancers much to hold onto, but they’re used to that. It’s the way Oguri has been creating critically acclaimed work for five years--extending the process of discovery right up to the stage. Even the company name, Renzoku, means continuum.

“We don’t want to execute the dance,” Steinberg said. “We want to find it.”*

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“IN BETWEEN THE HEARTBEAT,” Japan America Theatre, 244 S. San Pedro St., Little Tokyo. Date: Saturday, 8 p.m. Prices: $16-$18. Phone: (213) 680-3700.