Word: sankai
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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DIED. Yoshiyuki Takada, 31, one of five performers of Sankai Juku, a Japanese troupe whose unique and disturbing works combine avant-garde and folk-dance movements; during an outdoor performance in which Takada and three others were being lowered upside down from a roof to suggest childbirth, when his rope broke and he plunged 80 ft. to the ground; in Seattle. The group canceled the remainder of its ten-city U.S. tour...
There are images of deep despair in both of Sankai Juku's performance pieces, but they mix now with scenes of spiritual questing and transcendence, all performed with the erotic austerity of some deep sense memory. The style of buto now performed by Sankai Juku is an exercise in selective simplicity, like a piece of wood planed and smoothed so only the knot in the center remains...
...stiff as steel beams being hoisted skyward on a cable, as supple and serpentine as a garden stream. When Amagatsu moves diagonally across a stage past two huge brass circles in Jomon Sho, the movement is a piece of modest majesty that sets down a single, perfect line in Sankai Juku's geometry of mystery...
With the grace of history and the kindness of time and continued growth, Sankai Juku's unique voice may come to seem like greatness. It is a voice without words, like one of the silent sounds the dancers often mouth, their faces contorted like ancient tribal masks. Program notes attempting to describe segments of each of the two 90-minute pieces (such as "ripple of last breath" or "the vanity of nature") may be meant as signposts to a wondering, wandering audience, but no maps are really necessary for this journey...
Verbalized ideas only encumber these primal parables. The singular glory of Sankai Juku is that it achieves almost pure metaphor. It is not like anything else...