Guided by their inner voices

“We shake hands with the dead, who send us encouragement from beyond our body; this is the unlimited power of butoh.”

-- Tatsumi Hijikata

Butoh co-founder

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BUTOH was born in the decade after World War II as the ultimate underground dance idiom. From the first, it embraced the irrational, the violent, the morbid, the sexual and the sense of decay pervading Japanese life, rejecting “the calm beauty of Japan” and other cliches through which a conquered, deeply divided nation tried to reimagine and merchandise itself.

Though arguably inspired partly by prewar German Expressionism, butoh also repudiated Western modern dance, seeking a movement language that would be innately Japanese -- “something that can’t be acquired through training, something that your body teaches itself,” in Hijikata’s words -- without the sense of the exquisite that had long since infected nearly every other native idiom, even the once-disreputable Kabuki.

Today, however, nearly half a century after the first recorded butoh performance, what defines the idiom for an international audience is the exquisitely designed and modulated dance spectacles of Sankai Juku. Other artists in Japan and elsewhere still pursue Hijikata’s original vision, but the sevenmember, all-male company that Ushio Amagatsu founded 31 years ago has taken its ultra-refined version of butoh to more than 700 cities in 41 countries, achieving a popularity that butoh’s founders could never have imagined.

“I was born from the mud and sod,” Hijikata once declared. But like many other butoh dancers, the members of Sankai Juku look born from clouds or mist: nearly naked, hairless, painted white from head to toe -- as disembodied as living humans could possibly become. And they have influenced contemporary dancers everywhere by showing how receptive audiences can be to a slowly evolving, essentially meditative experience in which the choreography doesn’t so much directly express anything as represent a search for meaning within a central metaphor.

When Sankai Juku returns to Los Angeles on Friday and Saturday, performing “Kagemi: Beyond the Metaphors of Mirrors” as part of the UCLA Live series in Royce Hall, the subject will be what Amagatsu calls “looking at things on the other side of reflections -- that’s the realm of imagination, the virtual world.” Speaking through an interpreter, he describes “the water-mirror, the ancient way that people reflected their images. What is underneath the water-mirror -- the illusions of the other side -- that’s the image I wanted to bring to the audience.”

Most dancers spend much of their professional lives in front of rehearsal-studio mirrors, but Sankai Juku is different. “The only time these dancers look into mirrors is when they put on their makeup,” Amagatsu explains. “We do not use mirrors in the training room. The idea is that dancers should not be correcting their movements by looking at how they appear from the outside. Instead, it is important to communicate with oneself and grasp what would be the right movement through that process.”

At 56, Amagatsu still dances in all his new productions, and he has developed a company training system that incorporates his background in ballet and modern dance but with an emphasis on relaxation.

“By exploring relaxation, dancers can very deeply feel how every part of the body can be moved,” he says. “I begin with the dancers lying down, this being minimum tension against gravity. Very slowly, they are trained how to stand up, and by doing this they become aware how they deal with gravity. Then they are asked to walk and then gradually to add different movements. And then, carefully and gently, the training teaches them to move with concentration and to repeat what they do so that it can be improved.”

New works evolve from ideas, feelings and images that Amagatsu jots down: “Memorandums of words or lighting or costumes or emotional experiences or anything randomly. And because I have this cycle of creating new works pretty much every two years, I study the memorandums to decide what elements should be included and download those elements into new works.”

Because Amagatsu has a long-term arrangement with the Theatre de la Ville in Paris to premiere his works there, he must design their elaborate settings early in the creative process so raw materials can be sent from Japan to France by sea. Indeed, Amagatsu calls Paris his second home, speaks French fluently (though not, he insists, perfectly) and declares that the turning point in his life and career was his company’s first trip abroad in 1980.

“My attitude toward dance changed,” he recalls. “Perhaps this is because I encountered different cultures. I became fully aware of the distinctness of individual cultures but also the universality of cultures.” Beyond his work with Sankai Juku, he has directed Western opera productions seen in Tokyo, Paris, Brussels, Vienna and elsewhere.

Theatre de la Ville has co-produced 10 of Sankai Juku’s new works since 1982, and critics have argued that those works have become increasingly Frenchified, falling in step with the conceptual and pictorial priorities of the European avant-garde and betraying what butoh was born to do and be.

Amagatsu counters, “I don’t particularly mind some of those comments or criticisms. I agree that the work and the artistic direction of my creations are different now from 30 years ago. I think I am creating -- and I have to create -- my own butoh and develop that.

“Yes, it’s different now from the ‘70s butoh. But from that starting point, I have been following my natural flow of creative energy, pursuing my own path.

“I had different experiences from the founders or predecessors of butoh. But as they did, I confronted myself to see what has to be created for me, and I am following that natural urge to create.”

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lewis.segal@latimes.com

Segal is The Times’ dance critic.

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Sankai Juku

Where: Royce Hall, UCLA

When: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday

Price: $26 to $48

Contact: (310) 825-2101 or www.uclalive.org