‘Earthbeat ‘04’ dramatizes destruction and survival

Stark white walls and floor with a square black platform in the center transformed the George J. Doizaki Gallery at the Japan America Theatre plaza Friday into an abstraction of apocalypse for the intense improvisational duet “Earthbeat ‘04: Lightning.”

Designer Hirokazu Kosaka topped the knee-high platform with broken bits of charcoal, evoking a desolate, burnt-out landscape. Around and on this platform, dancer Oguri and musician Wadada Leo Smith presented an hourlong collaboration that seemed to mourn the destruction but ultimately find consolation in being and working together.

Oguri’s performance reflected the phenomenal concentration and contorted body language of the neo-Expressionist Japanese butoh idiom. Smith brought free-form jazz instincts and techniques to the occasion, performing most often on trumpet, but also flute and seashell.

While supplying everything from toneless gusts of air to sustained trumpet phrases, Smith continually watched his colleague, initially keeping his distance but sometimes acting protectively -- as when Oguri staggered blindly across the top of the platform and seemed about to fall until Smith stopped him with a warning gesture.

Sometimes crouched in meditation on a corner of the platform and at other moments collapsing into the charcoal and becoming smeared with its blackness as he desperately struggled to find his balance, Oguri expressed contrasting emotional states with great power and economy.

He performed a desperate little folk dance atop the rubble -- a memory, perhaps, of the communal culture that this landscape supported before calamity struck. And when he finally left the platform for one more circuit around it, he left charcoal tracks on that pristine white floor, reminding everyone of how disaster transforms the world.

The connection between Oguri and Smith sustained “Earthbeat ‘04” as a performance piece, but those smeared footprints and scattered bits of charcoal altering Kosaka’s formal scenic environment dramatized larger, deeper connections between people and the Earth that dance-theater rarely confronts this artfully.