Eiko and Koma’s ‘Dark’ Take on Isolation

In a rocky cavern deep within the Earth, two figures slowly stir in the darkness and reach up into thick masses of air roots that block the sky but refract brightness from above. Wearing robes that match the colors of their environment (white for the woman, red for the man), they sightlessly feel their way toward the light, and that light becomes their partner in the haunting life-cycle that is Eiko and Koma’s “When Nights Were Dark.”

At the Japan America Theatre on Thursday, the cavern turned out to be part of a steeply sloping, three-dimensional island set that not only completely revolved during the 70-minute choreo-spectacle (no intermission) but moved forward, bringing Eiko and Koma ever closer to their audience.

Long familiar to local audiences as a husband-and-wife team of dancer-choreographers that studied with the founders of the contemporary Japanese idiom called butoh, Eiko and Koma are masters of intense, incremental changes of position. Their ability to draw audiences into the experiences they depict, using the simplest of physical actions, gives their works a core of feeling missing in the empty pictorialism of such butoh-esque groups as Sankai Juku and Iona Pear Dance Theatre.

Lighted from inside, the island gleamed on its white side with what looked like clear crystals, but the red half seemed dangerously molten--never more so than in a tiny cave at its end where an all-but-nude Eiko exemplified human vulnerability amid shimmering crimson walls.

The changes in viewing angle and intimacy matched changes in accompaniment: a flowing, a cappella score, by Joseph Jennings (of the Chanticleer vocal group), that used the four-member Praise Choir Singers to create sound metaphors, suggesting everything from the faraway hum of insects to mass keening somewhere nearby.

Of course, we could hear the creak of wood as the set revolved and also could recognize that shredded fabric provided many of its exotic textures. But the metaphor held: This island seemed a living thing and, as directed by Scott Poitras (with input from Jeff Fontaine), the lighting powerfully reinforced Eiko and Koma’s connection to the Earth--and their return to it in the final moments as they sank down, his chin on her cheek, and the island disappeared into the growing darkness and distance.

Never fully standing on their island, and only briefly in contact with one another, Eiko and Koma made unbearable human isolation into unforgettable, unorthodox movement theater, the first indispensable dance event of the new century.

* Eiko and Koma perform “When Nights Were Dark,” tonight at 8 p.m. in the Japan America Theatre, 244 S. San Pedro St., downtown L.A. $9 to $30. (213) 680-3700.