Irreverent Condors Escape Tradition

Growing up in a time of endless recession and constant, unprecedented government scandal, a generation of savvy young Japanese had two choices: Become ninjas or nihilists. Happily, the 11 men of the multidisciplinary Condors performance group chose the latter, annihilating the bankrupt status quo through outrageous comedy and engulfing, anarchic dance.

At the Japan America Theatre on Friday, Condors performed a compendium of sketches, dances, puppet skits and video segments called “Conquest of the Galaxy: Jupiter--Love You Live,” a title that probably reads better in Japanese but at least expresses the evening’s mix of the mock-pompous and the deliriously upbeat.

Wearing traditional school uniforms, this anything-but-traditional Tokyo ensemble also adopted early-Beatles cuteness as protective coloration, with Richard Lester’s “A Hard Day’s Night” film serving as an obvious matrix for the freewheeling video inserts (the boys marrying one another in a formal Japanese garden, for instance) and all the sly cult-of-personality gambits onstage.

Some of the comedy simply took familiar ideas into the realm of surreal excess: a western movie parody, for example, in which company members played everything from swinging saloon doors to shadows cast by the opponents in a climactic gunfight. (As the day supposedly lengthened, so did the shadows--until it took four men on the floor to depict the shadow of one man standing.)

Elsewhere, however, Condors offered pithy action paintings of their native land, portraying a Tokyo bank as a monstrous bully and white-collar drunkenness as a “traditional” part of the landscape along with public baths, sumo wrestlers and Mt. Fuji.

The group also depicted a militaristic “captain of the world” playing demented war games with tiny action figures: not exactly a role model. So who could blame a puppet-Condor for ignoring schoolwork and escaping to exotic daydream vistas--escapes reinforcing the earlier video images of various Condors flying around the globe and doing rude things to Miss Liberty and the Sphinx?

These fantasies of rootless freedom found their complement in Ryohei Kondo’s choreography: breakneck amalgams of pop dance and martial arts in which the rigidity of Japanese social conventions exploded into wild fusillades of dodgy steps, high kicks, aerial twists, bold arm slashes and eccentric self-expression.

Kondo often made this style seem deliberately subversive, seizing unsuspecting conformists as they walked and unexpectedly turning their bodies into arsenals of energized individuality. Call it the rock ‘n’ roll impulse in the accompaniments turned into something more than either MTV-style narcissism (lampooned in one sequence) or artsy, abstract concert dance (lampooned in another).

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Ultimately it’s a vision of liberation: from the constraints and corruptions of 2001 as well as traditions offering alienated young Japanese nothing but targets for ridicule. As a result, Condors convey as much about millennial Japan as the austere Noh conveys about the values of the feudal aristocracy or the hedonistic Kabuki conveys about the values of the 18th century merchant-class.

Most of all, this skillful, endearing guy group shows how deeply escape calls to young people and how laughter and dance embody it at its most fulfilling.