Yasuko Yokoshi Journeys Into Her Heritage, Brings Back Contemporary Treasure

Comments (0) By Deborah Jowitt Wednesday, Mar 24 2010

What do you think is happening? A Japanese actor-dancer, Kuniya Sawamura, wearing black-and-silver Kabuki attire, swings a spear with fierce precision at the invisible enemies that surround him. At the same time, Kayvon Pourazar, a familiar dancer to downtown New York audiences, rushes about the space more freely, several times slamming against Dance Theater Workshop’s bare back wall. The sounds that Steven Reker draws from his guitar and other turbulent effects in Soichiro Migita’s sound design increase in intensity. Neither man acknowledges the other, but their pauses and sudden unleashings of energy seem to coincide, their deep lunges almost to mirror each other.

Alexandra Corazza

Kayvon Purazar and Kuniya Sawamura in Yasuko Yokoshi¹s Tyler Tyler

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Yasuko Yokoshi
Dance Theater Workshop
March 17 through 20

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In Yasuko Yokoshi’s fascinating and astonishingly beautiful Tyler Tyler, the juxtaposition of styles creates both contrasts and symmetries. In this case, Pourazar is performing a solo created by Yokoshi, with his collaborative input. It means whatever it means to him and whatever you’d like it to mean. Sawamura is performing a classical solo choreographed by Masumi Seyama VI; to a knowledgeable Japanese audience, its subject matter (drawn from the Kabuki play Funabenkei) has a very specific meaning. But Yokoshi doesn’t need the New York audience to know that, and, interestingly, in one night’s post-performance discussion (which I moderated), no American spectator asked to know what anything “meant.”

Yokoshi, born in Hiroshima, living here since 1981 (and dancing in works by a number of adventurous choreographers), has, since 2003, been on a quest into her personal history and the traditions of her native land. That was the year she created and performed her solo, Shuffle, which mingled a family tragedy with a Japanese creation myth; it was also the year she began to make trips to Japan to study with Seyama, a disciple of the prominent Kabuki performer and choreographer Kanjyuro Fujima VI (1900-1990). Fujima’s style, perfected within the Kabuki tradition of Su-odori, called for more purity and simplicity in the dances performed in the classical repertory. Seyama, a woman now in her seventies, co-choreographed Yokoshi’s 2006 What We When We, a recasting of a Raymond Carver short story using stylistic elements of Su-odori, and she choreographed the Japanese dances in Tyler Tyler, as well as coaching Pourazar and Julie Alexander.

Tyler Tyler is a formal investigation of doubling, beginning with the title. Since “l” and “r” sound identical in Japanese, Taira, the name of one of the two warring factions in Yokoshi’s source (the epic 12th-century Tale of the Heike), is interchangeable with Tyler. And throughout this elegantly shaped and performed work, East and West, Japanese and American, ancient and contemporary, personal and cultural are set beside one another, often in startling ways. For instance, near the beginning of Tyler Tyler, Naoki Asaji (one of three extraordinary performers from Japan—all trained by Seyama) enters with slow shuffling steps, makes a quarter turn, comes forward, and sinks to his knees before. . . a toy piano. He’s wearing a traditional costume like Sawamura’s. Pourazar—who has entered with him, garbed in jeans and a paler Western-style shirt—sits to one side. Then: a shock. Asaji, hitting the piano keys, erupts (in fastidiously articulated English) into the song “Yesterday Once More,” a nostalgic look at old radio hits, while Pourazar executes, without props, what looks like a tea ceremony. Behind them and to one side, Alexander dances—slanting backward until her shoulders touch the floor, running, spinning, hurling herself down and sliding on her belly.

Some of the scenes—dramatically lit by Ayumu “Poe” Saegusa—have more complex unities and disjunctions. And the costumes that Akiko Iwasaki designed for Alexander and Pourazar accentuate these. In the beginning Alexander wears a shirt similar to Pourazar’s but with a long denim skirt, ingeniously draped at the back and trailing slightly. When she dances in her own style, it flairs around her and must be managed. At some point, she gets a new dark gray denim skirt and matching fitted top with big puffed sleeves, while Pourazar reappears in gray pants and a short, tight, gray tailcoat with asymmetrically placed metal buttons. When Alexander ceremoniously hands him a cowboy hat and a gun, you realize that Yokoshi is relating the clan battles of ancient Japan to the feuds of the Wild West. It’s in this costume that Pourazar performs—carefully and gravely—a solo in the style that Seyama is perpetuating.

In one arresting passage, Reker plays his guitar and a shrill Japanese flute and sings in Japanese. Sawamura, kneeling opposite him on the other side of the stage, strikes a tsuzumi by way of punctuation, holding the small, high-pitched drum on his shoulder; periodically he emits the dramatic cries and prolonged vocal exhortations that figure in Kabuki plays. Alexander and Asaji, both holding golden fans, move in place with synchronized elegance. The style is contained, each passing emotion distilled into a subtle gesture or shift of gaze.

The gist of the dramatic scene (based on Shizu-no-Odomaki) is this: Shizu, a dancer, has watched her warrior lover set off through the snow and now must dance to entertain his brother (now his enemy) who holds her captive. Her child has been killed. Asaji’s face reflects an array of emotions. Alexander remains serene, almost stony of visage and voice as she speaks what’s possibly a very idiosyncratic translation of the words (Pourazar, taking the role of a Kabuki stagehand, crouches to hold a mic for her). Among her lines: “But what the hell; I’ve had to take the shit all by myself.” She calls her opponent an “evil fuck,” before saying, “Now I will dance for you.” Yet for all the layers of meaning in this scene—and in the even more multi-pronged, full-cast vision of the climactic battle of Dan-no-ura—every discrete moment is burnished to a glow.