Japanese dancers a festival feature

Press, 28 January 1988, Page 24

Japanese dancers a festival feature

Sankai Juku, the five man troupe of butoh dancers who will perform during the New Zealand International Festival of the Arts, recently completed a tour of North America.

“Kinkan Shonen,” the work which Sankai Juku will perform in Wellington during the Festival, was afeature of the four month tour.

The work of Sankai Juku is a development of the butoh dance style which emerged in post war Japan. A radical new mode of expression, this avant-garde dance form sets out to assault the senses. The visual impact is raw and direct.

“Projecting unerasable images is our business,” says the dancer and

choreographer, Ushio Amagatsu, who formed Sankai Juku in Tokyo in 1975. The five members of the troupe have shaven heads and their bodies are covered in rice powder dust. Movement varies from frenzied activity to near immobility and hand gestures, contortions and grimaces are used in expressing the most extreme of human emotions. “Kinkan Shonen” (The Kumquat Seed), concerns a young boy’s dream on the origins of life and death. In one scene, Amagatsu has real blood dripping from his neck, while in another a live peacock wanders the stage and

becomes part of the dance. The performance ends with Amagatsu hanging suspended head downwards in a stunning image of birth. Sankai Juku used to stage a hanging event to announce their arrival in town. But at a regular staging of their spectacular opening display in Seattle, a founding member of the group was killed. The rope holding Yoshiyuku Takada suspended by the ankles from a multi-storey building gave way, and he plunged to his death. Sankai Juku will perform “Kinkan Shonen” in Wellington’s State Opera House at 8.15 p.m. from March 16 to 19, and at 2 p.m. on March 20.