Just came back from the H. Art Chaos show - the fourth performance in American Dance Festival's lineup "Where Ballet and Modern Meet".
I was promised "provocative and powerful dance as you've never seen it before" but throughout the evening, I felt I had indeed seen it before - in high school dance competitions, in soap operas, in heavy metal concerts, in melodramatic opera scenes, in the circus.
H. Art Chaos is, ADF assures us, "one of Japan's top dance companies" but I found the work almost unwatchable. In the first piece, Flowers of the Bones, a woman begins dangling from the ceiling in a harness to eerie horror-movie music. She writhes and bounces, thwacking her arms and legs well beyond their natural range of motion, and finally descends where she is met by a chorus of other thwackers. The costumes were kind of cool - long mermaid tails that spouted confetti but overall the piece was empty affect...kind of like suicidal hair-dancing.
The movement language seemed to borrow from martial arts, kabuki, maybe a little butoh in the white-faced aesthetic, ballet, and...drill team? Layouts, split leaps, fan kicks, and (yes) chair dances that climaxed with all of the chorus draped over their chairs backwards, one hand extended towards the audience. WTF?
The second piece was Rites of Spring, first performed in 1995. More of the same - virtuosic solo dancer twacks some more while her oppressive chorus throws chairs of her. She slits her wrists, climbs into the bath tub, then emerges from the bath tub, spins really fast in the air on a harness, and then gets back into the bath tub. More hair dancing.
Sakiko Oshima, director of HAC include the following in the program: "While refusing to be placed in advance, we explore artistic ecstasy through chaos."
Umm. yes.
I can't help but feel that something was lost in translation. Like the liner notes and the explanations of the pieces in the show, the language was garbled. Clearly someone somewhere thought it had artistic merit. What piece/cultural context/background info/translation am I missing?
Let me know.