Japanese Butoh Dancers Create A Surreal World Of Haunting Movements

Dance preview "Nocturne," presented by Buto-Sha Tenkei, On The Boards, Thursday through Sunday. $15 to $17. There will be a post-performance discussion after Friday's performance. Tonight, the company will also be holding a master class. For tickets and more information, 325-7901.

Mutsuko Tanaka takes the stage and contorts her body into the subconscious. She claws. She twists. She looks out at the audience with such intensity that her eyes turn red.

So wild and twisted is her performance, in solo after solo, that one California newspaper critic was moved to dub Tanaka "the diva from hell."

The diva has now arrived in Seattle.

She's in a downtown apartment, in black layers and a shawl, and there's nothing that avant-garde about her, from her physical appearance to her very pleasant demeanor. She is tiny - 4 feed 9 - and wears three thin braids in her dark, frizzy, below-the-shoulder hair. She nods, folds her hands in her lap and patiently awaits each question as it is told to an interpreter, then knits her forehead when the interpreter speaks to her. At times, she even giggles when she tries to explain what it is that she does.

Tanaka is with her husband, Ebisu Torii, who is equally gracious and has just as difficult a time describing his wife's work. He is her choreographer and one of four dancers in Buto-Sha Tenkei, the Japanese company performing at On The Boards Thursday through Sunday. Seattle is the first leg of the company's first multi-city tour of the United States.

Buto-Sha Tenkei is theater and dance that can provoke standing ovations and walk-outs. Their genre of dance, butoh, is drama expressed through technically concentrated movements that explore anguish, loneliness, the unconscious, life and death. The movements can be haunting, near grotesque and surreal, as nightmarish as the accompanying music.

Butoh (pronounced boo-toh) is the Japanese contemporary dance form created by Tatsumi Hijakata some 30 years ago, rooted in the aftermath of World War II and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and influenced by German Expressionism.

It was and remains revolutionary in its approach, shunning traditional notions of dance and the more conservative Japanese performing arts. In butoh, the entire body is used, often stooped, gnarled and contorted as if in deep anguish. Hijakata's movements were like those of old people battered by farming and by the elements. Butoh movements also portray abstract concepts and entities, like spirits and horror.

Tanaka and Torii explain that they were university students when they first saw Hijakata perform butoh. What they saw shocked them. It knocked them out.

"I can't describe what it was. It was new," Torii says.

"It was something that I immediately connected with," says Tanaka, clasping her hands. "It was like I had just met my grandmother. Something touched my Japanese identity."

Much to the horror of each of their families, the pair, who didn't yet know each other, decided to join the now-legendary butoh company called Dairakudakan. Learning butoh, they explain, required immersion. The company members all lived together. There was physical training, but mostly it was "thinking about the dance 24 hours a day," Tanaka says.

They danced with Dairakudakan for eight years, and became soloists. They formed their own company in 1981, based on one of three main lines of butoh influenced by Hijakata. The work Torii creates is, like all butoh, full of pathos, but it also features touches of humor.

At On the Boards, the company will present Torii's 80-minute work "Nocturne," described in promotional materials as like a dream, like life slowly emerging from the depths of sleep, unfolding as though heat were applied to invisible ink.

When he created the work several years ago, Torii took to walking Tokyo's streets and parks at night. He wanted to see what night was all about, he says. What he discovered was the sense of being able to hear people sleeping in their beds. The sound of the wind. The sound of the stillness of midnight.

"It is very abstract, difficult to describe," he says, pulling out a flier advertising the work's premiere two years ago. The flier features a colored painting, Chagall-and-Miro-like, by Torii. There are several figures: One has two pairs of crossed legs, one is on its back, one hangs upside down, one has a wolf's head and a torso with breasts. Torii painted this based on his images for "Nocturne." He describes the painting as "like a hospital for crazy people."

Scenes in the work are loosely described this way: One owl. Girl dancing salsa. Animals. Night. White cow, white sheep. Woman in kimono. Man of water.

"Alternately poetic and disturbing," is how the Los Angeles Times called the work.

Tanaka describes her movements onstage this way: "I'm like an old woman. A baby. An old woman holding a baby. An old woman holding a baby and birds flying in the sky."

From the moment she goes into the theater to the moment she goes onstage, she says, she tries to forget herself as Mutsuko Tanaka, the person. She tries to be nothing in particular. She doesn't think about dancing at all. In fact, when Tanaka recalls what she considers her best performance, she says she realized she hadn't been thinking or feeling anything onstage.

When she first started dancing, 25 years ago, it was just dancing, she says. Now "it's become more complicated." It's richer. She can't quite figure out exactly what it is, but she wants to find out.

"That's why I keep performing."