Sankai Juku Stumbles Into Unfamiliar, Western Territory

The great achievement of the five-member Japanese group Sankai Juku has been to attract a large international audience to the daring, postwar dance-theater idiom known as butoh--in part by adding grandiose design elements that dramatize butoh’s emphasis on the elemental.

At UCLA’s Royce Hall on Friday, for example, Ushio Amagatsu’s “Hiyomeki” featured a full-stage sand pit dominated by a raised circular platform in the center; the golden edge of the platform eventually rose above the stage, hanging there like a ring of Saturn, or the Ring of the Nibelungen, making the dancers underneath look very small and vulnerable.

Amagatsu’s choreography complemented his scenic design with a sense of oppressive weight bearing down on everyone--reinforced in the portentous music by Takashi Kako and Yoichiro Yoshikawa. But by literally reflecting the many shifts of tempo, attack and instrumentation in that music, Amagatsu took “Hiyomeki” away from body-centered, process-driven butoh toward conventional Western modern dance--a world that the members of Sankai Juku are in no way qualified to enter.

For starters, they’re bad modern dancers. Amagatsu’s choreography depended heavily on reaching arms--sometimes overhead, sometimes to the side, almost always with hands turning into claws. But instead of producing those arm movements from deep within the back, the company offered physically shallow execution: hinged, puppety arms that left the choreography looking ungrounded and even arbitrary in its effects.

The most authentic moments came in a few classic butoh losses of balance and the point in one of Amagatsu’s solos in which he seemed to tear through a web of suffering and stand momentarily outside it. Otherwise, however, “Hiyomeki” provided picturesque attitudinizing galore but lacked both the movement invention of modern dance and the profound metaphysical connection of butoh.