On Stage: A (glowing) Dance

A woman slowly tiptoes into view, arms akimbo. A man crouches behind her, looking for something — we know not what. We hear the sound of a bell and the sound that a bubble might make. There’s a squeak.

The initial sensory deprivation of Kota Yamazaki’s new work, (glowing), seemed to soften the focus. But he would gradually expand his world at the New Hazlett Theater, part of the Andy Warhol Museum’s Off the Wall series.

Mr. Yamazaki opted to embrace a style of movement from half way around the globe. Certainly this writer never imagined that she would view a performance that paired Japanese butoh with African dance.

Butoh conveys the nature of its subject matter, becomes its essence. African dance, on the other hand, is historically performed in exotic natural surroundings, but is centered around celebration and rituals.

Where African dance begins with the beat and weaves intricate rhythms, butoh simply exists and is performed with a musical cyclorama that surrounds it.

Oh, what connections to be made!

The starting point was Junichiro Tanizaki’s essay, In Praise of Shadows.  In it, Mr. Tanizaki praises elements of traditional beauty to be found in architecture and all that it encompasses such as fittings, jade, food and other subjects. But these were seen in a half-light before the invention of modern lighting systems.

Mr. Tanizaki kept that probing idea and transported it to a contemporary stage with a nuanced lighting design by Kathy Kaufmann. The company, called Fluid Hug-hug, was composed of six dancers moving in Mr. Tanizaki’s own style, which he named Fluid Technique.

For the most part, this meant slowing the movement to a flicker or a ripple through the body and most eloquently through the fingertips. But there were off-kilter walks and lurching in a circle and a jiggling foot.

The interaction of subtle phrases created quite lovely landscapes with an improvisatory feel, although one woman erupted into her own African dance, leaping to her own internal rhythms. It was mesmerizing at its best, although (glowing) was content for a time to simply glow instead of grow.

At the end the performers took hanging beams that served as mobile set pieces, designed by American architect Robert Kocik, and dismantled them. The dancers placed them like pylons around the space, hinting at a building and with the movement still creating a sustainable connection in our memory.