Butoh

It is not necessary to wait for companies with the exotic names of Dairakudikan or Sankai Juku to introduce one to the wonders of Butoh dance. At the Community Education Center last night, one Maureen Fleming did the job splendidly. Butoh is an avant-garde Japanese dance form that combines traditional Japanese theater forms, with their emphasis on meditative, flowing movement; the "silent cry" of German expressionist art; and a sensibility that could have arisen only out of the experience of Hiroshima.

Kazuo Ohno, 103, who brought the Japanese modern dance style of Butoh to the international stage and charmed audiences with eerie but poetic performances, died Tuesday of respiratory failure. Mr. Ohno was credited along with Tatsumi Hijikata as a founder of Butoh - a dance form characterized by slow movements executed in a low crouched stance and often performed in whiteface. He was born on the northernmost main island of Hokkaido, a son of a fisherman. He began to study dance after graduating from college in the 1930s.

Japanese-born Kota Yamazaki started his dance company, Fluid hug-hug, not long after moving to New York in 2002. Last year, he won a Bessie Award with Germaine Acogny for choreographing FAGAALA on Compagnie Jant-Bi, which Acogny directs in Senegal. Interested in researching Butoh, a post-World War II performance art, Acogny visited Japan in 2000, met Butoh-master Yamazaki, and invited him to work with her. He visited three times, teaching her dancers Butoh techniques and immersing himself in Senegalese dance traditions.

Japanese post-Butoh dancers Uno Man and Kazco Takemoto, joined by Maka Kawano, gave an unparalleled performance - astounding in concept, movement and perverse levity - to a packed audience Tuesday night at the Community Education Center. Kudos to Group Motion's Manfred Fischbeck, who stepped in to present them when he learned they were looking for a Philadelphia concert on their current tour. With them, East and West not only meet but also marry, forming a new territory to be explored from multiple approaches.

In a time when much of contemporary dance turns on irony, the mundane, and pop influences, there's something refreshing about a dancer who is committed to expressing deep feeling. Margie Gillis has built a 20-year career on this commitment, performing worldwide and receiving acclaim and honors in her native Canada. Gillis opened this year's Dance Celebration series at the Annenberg Center on Monday, performing 11 short pieces with four guest dancer-choreographers, including the New York City Ballet's Robert La Fosse.

Cherry Blossoms, a contemplative film from German director Doris Dorrie, is a fusion of West and East as strange and weirdly satisfying as stuffed-cabbage sushi rolls. In cinematic shorthand: Imagine Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Cherry Blossoms is both austere and garish, simultaneously dry and sentimental, tightly repressed and extravagantly expressive, bourgeois and bohemian. It's a seesaw, but Dorrie finds the balance. This film that spans the Bavarian Alps and Mount Fuji is a portrait of spousal relations and its effect on the couple's grown children, one of whom has moved from Germany to Japan.

At the Painted Bride last weekend, we got only 20 minutes of evidence of things (un)said, an excerpt from Charles O. Anderson's work in development that is slated to be premiered by his dance theatre X next year. The Bride's stage was too small to hold this rib-thumping, heart-pumping, cry-mercy-Mama dance. A section with six female dancers was too crowded to look cleanly executed, although most of them danced full out. I hope to see it on a larger stage like the Perelman when it is finished.

Why are those rabbits sitting on those lamp poles? That was my first and admittedly mundane thought pondering the strange beauties of Yuragi: In a Space of Perpetual Motion, a dance performed by Sankai Juku. Animal activists, calm down: Yes, two rabbits are the living props for the dance that will be presented tonight and tomorrow at the Zellerbach Theatre at Annenberg Center, a stop on the Japanese troupe's 18-city U.S. tour, its first in several years. Although the rabbits rest in bowls astride poles nearly as high as the stage ceiling, they look curiously comfortable.

Cross Planet seemed like a nifty name for Group Motion's season-ending performance at the Community Education Center this weekend, with a program including not only Group Motion, but also visiting members of the Tokyo-based Dance Theatre 21. Turns out the name also had much to do with Group Motion's offering, a three-part piece called Cultures and Species. Artistic director Manfred Fischbeck started with a diaristic solo. He moved laconically against a backdrop of projected text that explained the piece's genesis in a recent trip to his birthplace halfway across the world in Tanzania, a view of Earth from the returning plane, and world events including the Columbia shuttle explosion.

When, smack in the middle of stark Butoh dance, you find yourself humming a mindless little ditty from Wish You Were Here, you know that something has gone terribly wrong. But there is a link. Water. Wish You Were Here was a silly 1950s Broadway musical that would have closed overnight were it not for a real swimming pool in the middle of the stage. People came in droves to see it. Unetsu, the piece that the Japanese company Sankai Juku is performing through Sunday at the City Center, also takes place in a large pool of water.

Kazuo Ohno, 103, who brought the Japanese modern dance style of Butoh to the international stage and charmed audiences with eerie but poetic performances, died Tuesday of respiratory failure. Mr. Ohno was credited along with Tatsumi Hijikata as a founder of Butoh - a dance form characterized by slow movements executed in a low crouched stance and often performed in whiteface. He was born on the northernmost main island of Hokkaido, a son of a fisherman. He began to study dance after graduating from college in the 1930s.

Cherry Blossoms, a contemplative film from German director Doris Dorrie, is a fusion of West and East as strange and weirdly satisfying as stuffed-cabbage sushi rolls. In cinematic shorthand: Imagine Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Cherry Blossoms is both austere and garish, simultaneously dry and sentimental, tightly repressed and extravagantly expressive, bourgeois and bohemian. It's a seesaw, but Dorrie finds the balance. This film that spans the Bavarian Alps and Mount Fuji is a portrait of spousal relations and its effect on the couple's grown children, one of whom has moved from Germany to Japan.

Japanese-born Kota Yamazaki started his dance company, Fluid hug-hug, not long after moving to New York in 2002. Last year, he won a Bessie Award with Germaine Acogny for choreographing FAGAALA on Compagnie Jant-Bi, which Acogny directs in Senegal. Interested in researching Butoh, a post-World War II performance art, Acogny visited Japan in 2000, met Butoh-master Yamazaki, and invited him to work with her. He visited three times, teaching her dancers Butoh techniques and immersing himself in Senegalese dance traditions.

At the Painted Bride last weekend, we got only 20 minutes of evidence of things (un)said, an excerpt from Charles O. Anderson's work in development that is slated to be premiered by his dance theatre X next year. The Bride's stage was too small to hold this rib-thumping, heart-pumping, cry-mercy-Mama dance. A section with six female dancers was too crowded to look cleanly executed, although most of them danced full out. I hope to see it on a larger stage like the Perelman when it is finished.

Take it from this horse's mouth. This weekend's show at the Painted Bride acts both as a primer of Philadelphia dance history and a sampler of the many dancing bodies that grace our city. Like a traveling medicine show, From the Horse's Mouth stops in cities around the country, calling out dancers who have a story to tell. The result is good for what ails you. Philadelphia is the show's 19th stop since it was inaugurated at Manhattan's Joyce Soho theater in 1998. Dancer-choreographers Tina Croll and partner James Cunningham cooked up the formula, a simple and flexible one that can be used anywhere.

All her life, choreographer Roko Kawai has zigzagged between two cultures: Japanese and American. Born in Tokyo, she first came to the United States at age 3. But her cardiologist father led the family back to stay in Japan several times, so she spent nearly as much time in school there as here. After her first dance performances about a decade ago, Kawai became known in Philadelphia for her gutsy amalgam of imaginative props, video and voiceovers, and improv-based movement. A long-time figure skater, she has roller-skated on stage, played with sand, lip-synched to karaoke, and been lowered from a cable wrapped inside a fabric cocoon.

Cross Planet seemed like a nifty name for Group Motion's season-ending performance at the Community Education Center this weekend, with a program including not only Group Motion, but also visiting members of the Tokyo-based Dance Theatre 21. Turns out the name also had much to do with Group Motion's offering, a three-part piece called Cultures and Species. Artistic director Manfred Fischbeck started with a diaristic solo. He moved laconically against a backdrop of projected text that explained the piece's genesis in a recent trip to his birthplace halfway across the world in Tanzania, a view of Earth from the returning plane, and world events including the Columbia shuttle explosion.

Japanese post-Butoh dancers Uno Man and Kazco Takemoto, joined by Maka Kawano, gave an unparalleled performance - astounding in concept, movement and perverse levity - to a packed audience Tuesday night at the Community Education Center. Kudos to Group Motion's Manfred Fischbeck, who stepped in to present them when he learned they were looking for a Philadelphia concert on their current tour. With them, East and West not only meet but also marry, forming a new territory to be explored from multiple approaches.

Those flyaway wisps of gauzy fabric, hanging in layers on the wall of performance artist Kathy Rose's Manhattan apartment, don't look like much. But turn the lights off, click the video projector on, and they're transformed: Rose's slowly moving form shimmers, repeated and echoed through the overlapping layers of cloth. Mysterious images seem to float around and through her - strands of hair, floating curlicues of color. It's a moment of Kathy Rose magic, like her hard-to-define, hallucinatory performances, which also combine her body with projected images she creates.

In a time when much of contemporary dance turns on irony, the mundane, and pop influences, there's something refreshing about a dancer who is committed to expressing deep feeling. Margie Gillis has built a 20-year career on this commitment, performing worldwide and receiving acclaim and honors in her native Canada. Gillis opened this year's Dance Celebration series at the Annenberg Center on Monday, performing 11 short pieces with four guest dancer-choreographers, including the New York City Ballet's Robert La Fosse.