Almost fifty years old, the Butoh style of modern, metaphysical Japanese dance is a rare and purist beast to the uninitiated. By definition, its philosophy suggests an implicit resistance to the niceties of classical choreography - no fancy foot-work thrills the Gods beholding a Sankai Juku production: these fellows are living, conceptual sculptures who thrill to the power of physicality and big ideas. A close analogy with abstract art can be drawn, for visual impact is subverted to the great god of inner meaning; and expressionist thought referenced, along with Sartre's existentialism, and iconoclastic Genet. Forget slow-food, this is slow-dance of an order that transcends anything as banal as story-telling or explicit exposition. My interpretation of magus Ushio Amagatsu's programme notes would hazard that we were looking at man's emergence from the primeval slime, and his subsequent ascent from water to land. I might - however - be wrong.
      The performance consisted of eight skeletal, chalk-powdered figures articulating themselves around a semi-circle of standing stones suggestive of a giant sun-dial - by way of Stonehenge. There was method in their tortured, attenuated madness, but not (to my mind) sufficient beauty in the bathos. My companion, Robin Mills, a young, third-year ballet sudent, with insufficient funding to attend many public performances, was rapt - but qualified this rapture. In his opinion - endorsed by me - there was a clinical detachment about the company which was utterly removed from their audience. It was as if we had interrupted a rehearsal, and the players' self-absorbtion morphed imperceptively into self-indulgence. As a dancer, Robin also noted the dearth of body contact between performers. As spectacle, their earthy, grounded mis-en-scene lacked elevation, and became, at times, disappointingly two-dimensional.
      In translation, Sankai Juku - this all-male troupe founded by Ushio Amagatsu - means workshop of the mountain and sea, a reference to the two basic elements of Japanese topography. Toki's staging is defined by its depiction of living, breathing men-as-monoliths. I was more impressed by the company's sentient tableaux, than I was by their interaction with one another. Amagatsu opines that 'moments are the only things that exist in all of time' - a somewhat gnomic interpretation of Toki's leitmotif. His performers are swathed in monastic, saffron robes, which later descend to the waist for torso-bearing, homoerotic emphasis. Red, waxen deposits drip from individual ears, but it is far from clear whether this is a reference to the mind-bending, atonal, dirge-like music or more esoteric tropes.
     There was an other-worldly beauty to Amagatsu's shaven-headed, Nosferatu-like cast; but simultaneously, they were slightly repulsive. Posturing and preening, chalk-dust flurrying in their wake, bone-structures were peculiarly defined by each and every muscle-stretch. Less hubris and more heart would have served this production well. Such automatons were creatures of a Fritz Lang-depicted, mechanical future - not the nostalgic elementals of our prehistoric past.
Caroline Kellett Fraysse