Word: sankai
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Japan's Sankai Juku revels in primal movement
These, respectively, are the opening images of two dance theater pieces by Sankai Juku, Jomon Sho (Homage to Prehistory) and Kinkan Shonen (The Kumquat Seed), which have the clear, smooth grace of a rock in a Japanese garden and the impact, simultaneously, of the same rock hurled. Each piece has a rather spindly framework that is part narrative, part philosophical speculation and part rendering of the collective unconscious poised perpetually between rigor and hysteria. Jomon Sho is a plunge into the mythic past and is the more literal of the two pieces Sankai Juku presented last week at New York...
Ushio Amagatsu, 34, who founded Sankai Juku (the name means studio of the mountains and the sea) in Tokyo in 1975, and remains its director as well as one of its five performers, works in a style of contemporary Japanese dance called buto, in which, he has written, "the body enters a state of perfect balance. Buto belongs both to life and to death. It is a realization of the distance between a human being and the unknown." Like other artists working from within a conception of Japanese modernism-the film director Nagisa Oshima, the designer Issey Miyake-Amagatsu...