Japan Takes Chelsea

The Joyce Theater’s fall season is off to a distinctly international start. Following the current performances by Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company, which conclude this Sunday, Japan’s Sankai Juku settles in for a two-week run, performing Tobari—As If in an Inexhaustible Flux, the most recent work by founder and artistic director Ushio Amagatsu. The troupe has made frequent, fervently admired visits to New York ever since its 1984 local debut, most often to the spacious BAM Opera House, where it last performed in 2006. But these are its first appearances at The Joyce, which will offer audiences a chance to view the mysterious, often hypnotic action of Amagatsu’s deliberately paced full-evening work in a more intimate space.

Sankai Juku, founded in 1975, is considered an important exponent of Butoh, the Japanese style of dance that has proven enduring and influential in recent decades. Before launching the company, Amagatsu performed with Dairakudakan, a much larger ensemble, but soon realized that he “wanted to create a company that consists of a small number of dancers and explores the possibilities of expressions that can be attained by ‘the less,’” as he told an interviewer in 2006. Sankai Juku’s all-male troupe, which numbered five dancers for its first local appearances, remains compact; there are seven dancers, including Amagatsu, in Tobari.

“I was determined to establish my own Butoh, by confronting myself, just as the founders did so to establish the art form of Butoh,” Amagatsu told that interviewer. “I thought that it was important not just to inherit Butoh from the founders, but simultaneously to pursue my own path, because the background/social context of the work, individual experiences and characteristics are all different. For me, Butoh is a dialogue with gravity. If the European/American dances are based on the concept of being free from gravity, maybe we can say that in contrast, my dance is based on that of sympathizing or synchronizing with gravity. The movement comes from how the dancers respond to the environment they are existing within. It’s about feeling the air and its vibration around them; we can call it a dialogue with air.”

Butoh is often associated with extremely slow-moving, deliberate movement, distorting the body’s shape rather than exalting it. Reviewing its initial New York performances back in 1984, Anna Kisselgoff wrote in the New York Times, “Sankai Juku has a strong preoccupation with grotesque, distorted and deformed bodies. And yet—this is the key point—Sankai Juku manages to suggest that aberrations are so much a part of the natural order of things that they can be beautiful.” Striking, evocative lighting and simple yet profound imagery drawn from nature have often been Sankai Juku hallmarks, and their works often inspire descriptions such as “dreamlike” or “poetic.”

In Tobari, which explores themes of life, death and rebirth, sand covers much of the stage and surrounds a central, gleaming black oval. Often divided into contrasting, juxtaposed groups of three and four, the men move with a fluidity and occasional rapidity that belies the standard expectations of Butoh. They glide across the sandy expanse, and frame the central oval like acolytes. A starry nighttime expanse appears upstage partway through.

“I consciously structured the piece this way to have no breaks from the beginning to the end, because I wanted to unfold this piece with sense of speed and accumulation,” Amagatsu told a Japanese interviewer shortly before the current U.S. tour began. “My interpretation of ‘tobari’ as a word is ‘a border between day and night.’ It is something that one has to let in or accept/receive, but an important concept for me is that it is something that’s there already when you notice it, that sense of past tense and that sense of the time difference. In Japanese, the word sometimes means ‘different space partitioned by thin cloth, or that cloth/partition itself.’ Again, the important concept for me is the acknowledgement that you were wrapped up with/surrounded by it. Then, we find in the tobari, something twinkling, they are stars… We are receiving the past tense in present tense.”

Sankai Juku’s performances deliver an enveloping, refined world of subtle imagery and texture, inviting viewers to slow down and share in the dancers’ focused serenity, finding their own associations and interpretations in the action. Amagatsu has said about his work, “For me, impression is more important than comprehension.”

Sankai Juku

Oct. 5-17, [Joyce Theater], 175 8th Ave. (at W. 19th St.), 212-242-0800; $10 & up.