Butoh Programs Rigorously Explore Opposing Themes

Created in a backlash against the image of squeaky-clean efficiency in postwar Japan, butoh has evolved into a form of neo-Expressionist movement theater as celebrated for its physical rigor as for its obsession with disease, disorder and the irrational. “Butoh strips the body to its essence,” said one of its masters, Min Tanaka, articulating an experiential viewpoint, while the great Kazuo Ohno emphasized psychological priorities: “Butoh brings the subconscious before our very eyes.”

By coincidence, these distinct perspectives found embodiment over the weekend in separate small-scale performances by locally based artists Oguri and Michael Sakamoto. Sharing a fascination with women’s undergarments, Wagnerian accompaniments and the characteristic butoh stagger (a blind flailing for balance), their two pieces otherwise went in opposite directions: Oguri’s toward a physical union with space and light on Saturday, Sakamoto’s toward the seductive illusions of night and darkness on Sunday.

The first event in a two-year multimedia investigation of links between nature and consciousness, Oguri’s hourlong “Study 1, Project--Height of Sky” remade the courtyard of La Boca Performance Space at Sunshine Mission/Casa de Rosas into a landscape of sand-colored muslin and large rocks. On those rocks lay Oguri, Sherwood Chen and Boaz Barkan, covered by small plastic bags filled with water. As they imperceptibly stirred and then slowly arose, the bags fell and often burst, with Chen and Barkan remaining roughly parallel in both tasks and pacing, but Oguri much faster and wilder in his violent rolling across the rocks and floor.

Meanwhile, Jamie Burris stalked through the courtyard as if absorbing or reflecting pure evil, eventually joining Chen in a grotesque tableau: their clothes and mouths bulging with the water bags. Dripping and oozing, they groped their way into a final cluster with Barkan (compulsively folding the muslin as if desperate to put his world in order) and Oguri (exhausted or dazed and now wearing only panties).

A longing for transformation or transcendence pervades much of butoh, and here--oppressed by the elements of Earth and Water--the cast’s constant upward reaching conveyed a yearning for fusion with the limitless sky. In contrast, Sakamoto’s “Glorious Day for an Unknown Woman” in the tiny, enclosed gallery at Espace DbD expressed its longings through poetic texts, its transformative energies through wistful role-playing and attempts at fusion with the magical images of motion pictures.

The final section of Sakamoto’s “Cinema Trilogy,” this 100-minute solo evoked the Tokyo, Paris and Hollywood sojourns of what the program booklet called “the great, obscure Japanese film narrator (benshi) and filmmaker Musei,” by showing Sakamoto first in male Japanese attire, then in a Louise Brooks wig and evening gown, finally in flamboyant hippie drag, with the movement style adjusted to suggest, and dryly parody, each nation’s body image.

A commanding performer with large, expressive hands, Sakamoto moved with the energy bursts of an actor rather than the more sustained impetus of a dancer, turning the three structurally identical sections into a dramatic tour de force. However, the result suffered from his addiction to darkness--a darkness thematically pertinent and even immensely varied in its own way but so pervasive and near-absolute that just seeing the performance often proved a hopeless, butoh-esque struggle against physical impossibility.

* “Glorious Day for an Unknown Woman” continues Friday through Sunday, 8 p.m., Espace DbD, 2847 S. Robertson Blvd., Los Angeles. $10-$15. (310) 839-0661.