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Danspace Project Board member Douglas Dunn offers his impressions on:
Yasuko Yokoshi's what we when we
March 23, 2006
Not just another modern dance costume; enough recognizably culture-specific dress, and enough movement and gesture seen in Japanese movies, to keep me guessing: am I in the comfort zone of a traditional form, or the extra-uncomfortable zone of a mix of historical reference and contemporary aesthetic promiscuousness?; the palette of slow, and the physicality of understated, make structure and detail stand out; to the sound of rain she enters with umbrella, closes it, and lithely, on smallest possible scale, almost inconspicuously, shakes one hand as if it's wet-a firework in the glitterless sky; movement and gesture located in a middle ground between literal and artificial: they mime drinking, cupless, later with folded-up fan as pitcher; he holds real cigarette, but mimes lighting and smoking it; they move flat white cushions somewhat as if they need them for kneeling or sitting, somewhat as if some ritual practice requires them, somewhat as if, formal device, they are there no more no less as another interesting texture, and their squareness reflective of the frequent right angles of their various manners and tempos of walking; lyrical ambiguity pervades; when three stamp themselves into wide martial-artish positions late in the evening, the tension and suspense roused by the base of heretofore uncompromising restraint is momentarily released; posture, gaze, facing become, in this play without words, major determiners of mood; my appetite for dancey action is tested; one fellow has a large moustache, I begin to see handle-barred guys with sustained mouth froth; certainly this association is misplaced, I must get back to watching what is; sound is important, bare feet, versus wooden clogs, versus tabbies, each a different aural and textural relation to floor, each an alteration of physical carriage and gait; the performers emerge gradually as characters through small differences in degrees of bodily tension, postural attitude, props, and specific gestures, but their silence keeps them psychologically lesss than completely defined; romantic insinuendo is played out more obviously, but only as fleeting circumstance, not as developed cathartic narrative; care of atmosphere evident everywhere: no announcement at top of show-red carpet on good bit of wood floor, so audience sharing the performers' space (rest of us on altar)-on extension of red carpet (suggestion of Kabuki runway?) two mirrors supine, not put into active play, but echo in shape the narrow rectangular upright video screen onto which, like breathes of outdoor air, landscapes are thrown briefly occasionally; lighting interactive with the movement and space, never intrusive; a blackout divides even-toned show roughly in half, then another, followed by short coda; score musical at times, more often birds, frogs, rain, and other outdoor references; the highly oblique use of contemporary literary springboard and traditional theatrical form remind me emphatically how opaque is all physical presentation that doesn't take pains to explain itself, and how much a westernized, hyper-kinetic eye looks to inventive action to fill that part of mental landscape bare of verbalized understanding.
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