Understanding the Situation’s Gravity

Chalk-white from head to toe, four hairless creatures emerge from darkness into a large pool of light. Severe and expressionless, they move at an achingly slow pace toward what is at the center of the stage--a giant disc--and gesture in worshipful silence at its periphery.

A fifth figure enters and walks onto the middle of the disc, then drops down. Supporting his body from the hips, he begins to lift his arms and legs and flail about--in slow motion. He might be weightless, a space walker tumbling through ether. Or he might be a newborn babe, just extruded from the womb and testing the oxygen of the external universe.

The extreme look, minimalist music and stark symbolism of props and lighting are from the latest work of Sankai Juku, to be performed at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Friday and Saturday. The dance troupe may be from Japan, but it might as well be from Venus or Mars, or maybe the next galaxy. Yet while the performances are eerily otherworldly, Sankai Juku has also transfixed audiences the world over because, in its unique way, it touches the universal.

New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff called “Yuragi,” an earlier work, “the equivalent of a pilgrim’s progress” and “a universal tale couched in highly original terms.”

Sankai Juku--the name, translated by founder and director Ushio Amagatsu, means “Mountain Sea Atelier”--is arguably the most international of Japanese contemporary dance companies, part of the avant-garde dance movement known as butoh.

So what is butoh?

Amagatsu, reached via telephone in Iowa, the first leg of the company’s current American tour, avoids answering the question directly. “In my opinion it’s a dialogue with gravity,” he begins, speaking through a translator. “Like in many other dance forms, one is always thinking, ‘What is a human being?’ ” When asked for more specifics, he says, politely, “I would like to answer in the course of the other questions.” His subsequent remarks are both cryptic and illuminating, the way one imagines answers to Zen koans to be (“Does the dog have a Buddha nature?”).

About every two years, the soft-spoken, wiry Amagatsu choreographs and designs one dance--an extended piece about 90 minutes long and characterized by a theme hinted at by such titles as “The Egg Stands Out of Curiosity” (“Unetsu” is the Japanese title), “The Darkness Calms Down in Space” (“Shijima”) and “The Grazed Surface” (“Omote”). In English the current piece is called “Within a Gentle Vibration and Agitation,” in Japanese the title is “Hiyomeki”--simple to pronounce but loaded with meaning, something Amagatsu clearly relishes.

“Hiyomeki” refers to the fontanel, commonly known as the “soft spot” on a newborn baby’s skull. It’s a thin membrane that separates the inside from the outside; it’s a place where you can see blood vessels pulsing beneath the surface. It’s also a child’s most vulnerable spot.

“Of course, everyone must have their own interpretation,” Amagatsu insists. However, in explaining the thinking that went into the piece, he offers some clues. “No, it wasn’t from looking at a baby,” he says. He points out that his works tend to evolve from one to the next and that previous works have a strong influence on the creation of the present one. “In the last piece [“Yuragi”] I used many discs on stage, so I consolidated those into one large circle.”

After a moment, he explains more. “For ‘Hiyomeki’ I was thinking about the cycle of life and the continuity of generation to generation.” He adds, “And also inherent in the structure of the circle is that you can be inside and protect it, or you can be outside and be blocked from being inside. There’s a possibility for something to be born inside the circle, and for something from the outside to try to break its way in.”

“Hiyomeki” is divided into seven parts, which begin and end in a dreamlike flow. Recorded music by Takashi Kako (piano) and Yoichiro Yoshikawa (synthesizer) contribute to the work’s somnambulistic quality. Some of the music seems positively New Age. In the segment “Seed--Like a Ripple,” three dancers sway in synchronicity in a circle amid dappled light suggesting ripples on water. The music is a pleasant, drifting melody--conveying floating sentiments of peace and harmony that counter the hard-edged avant-gardism that has characterized earlier butoh. There is even a hint of Martha Graham in one segment--as dancers in long-skirted costumes rotate and assume angular postures reminiscent of mythical priestesses or divinities of ancient Greece and Egypt.

The company’s five members--in addition to Amagatsu, the others are Semimaru, Toru Iwashita, Sho Takeuchi and Taketeru Kudo--are at their most distinctly Sankai Juku-esque when performing “Anthropos--Memory From the Past or the Future.” To Space Age electronic sounds, a quartet walks across the disc, while a large silver metal ring suspended overhead shifts with their progress.

Now they point skyward, now they drop their heads, now they fall. Then rise again. While critics have interpreted this segment as a protest against the horrors of the atomic bomb and the French testing of nuclear explosives in the South Pacific, Amagatsu says there was no such link in his mind. He doesn’t want to explain the origin of this scene, “but I will tell you this much, the title ‘Anthropos’ refers to the human condition. So what I’m saying is that it deals with the evolution of man, from crawling to standing to walking and so on.”

And falling? Yes, the falling is important, too.

“This gets to how I feel about dance,” he says. “Dance very often involves using the will, and falling is about losing the body’s consciousness, acted upon by an outside will. And this gets back to the issue of gravity.” While some might consider gravity a nuisance, Amagatsu looks at gravity as “the attraction of the Earth to people.”

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Butoh emerged in Japan in the 1960s, under the leadership of Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno. Amagatsu was a disciple of the former before forming Sankai Juku in 1975. Five years later, the company toured Europe and was such a hit that Theatre de la Ville in Paris commissioned it to do a new work. This has since become a biannual event, providing a kind of institutional support Amagatsu could not get in Japan. So today Sankai Juku is based in France, making regular tours abroad and even occasionally back to the homeland.

While most butoh performances in Japan take place in cramped, obscure spaces, Sankai Juku commands large halls--testament not only to the striking beauty of its craft, but also to the benefits of coming home with an international reputation.

The dancers, all men, are clean-shaven--even their heads are bald--and covered with a ghostly chalk white. In the past they have worn nothing but the skimpiest of loincloths, but now Sankai Juku dons long skirts and robes, usually white. Why the severe look? “To respond with one word: simplicity,” Amagatsu replies. “It’s a way of erasing a person’s individual personality and expressing a more universal humanness.” By reducing external differences, he means for audiences to focus more intently on gestures and movements.

Certain movements and postures recur in Sankai Juku’s dance lexicon--grimacing, distorted faces; hands and arms weaving exquisitely through space; and occasional fits--a bit of chaos introduced into the ordered cosmos. In the short text he has written on “Hiyomeki,” Amagatsu says: “Interior force and exterior force./Multiple centers./The vital connection between voluntary movement/and gravity/The body continually vibrates and is agitated/between the two.”

The divisions and contrasts are accentuated by long passages of slow, nearly meditative movements punctuated by sudden bursts of energy. This high-contrast pacing can also be found in such traditional and better-known Japanese theatrical forms as Noh and Kabuki. “[That is because] Japanese people are creating it,” Amagatsu remarks. “I was born in Japan and raised in Japan, and I have no choice than to have a connection to Japanese culture, so it’s natural for me to be this way.”

While the meditative and nearly worshipful nature of the dances might seem religious, Amagatsu separates himself from existing religious practice. “I like to think that we keep an equal distance from all religions,” he says. “The problem with looking at the piece from the point of view of a religion, like Zen, is that there’s a particular way you’re meant to enjoy it.” Of course there is a spiritual dimension in his works. “Just as I am looking for simplicity in the look I create for dancers, many people of all religions aspire to that kind of simplicity in their devotional practice.”

This austerity of appearance combined with the rigorous precision of movement makes the dancers seem monk-like on stage. Naturally, one suspects them of leading ascetic lives offstage.

Not so, says Amagatsu, with the first hint of humor. “We do not live like monks, sorry to disappoint you! We’re leading normal lives--we eat, we drink.” Seeing as they live in bon vivant Paris, does that include some nice little French wines? “Yes, we drink that, too.”

Now the butoh master laughs, ever so softly. *

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“HIYOMEKI” (WITHIN A GENTLE VIBRATION), Royce Hall, UCLA. Dates: Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m. Prices: $13-$40. Phone: (310) 825-2101.