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| "Trivial Perfection" Photo by Richard Termine |
Japan Society’s 2025 Contemporary Dance Festival offered a gender sandwich Saturday night, reflecting some of the current cultural turmoil in east Asia. An all-male troupe from Korea opened the program, and an all-female ensemble from Japan ended it. In between was a pas de deux from Taiwan, with a twist or two.
The K-boys — five guys who call themselves C.Sense, short for crude sensibility —won the audience and the night hands down, or rather hands up, with a precision workout they called “Trivial Perfection.” In T-shirts and gym shorts, they turned simple movements into complex forms and moving shapes — pyramids, spirals, implosions and explosions. They started with finger-flexing, proceeded to arm-flapping and hand-slapping and then body-slamming — chest to chest like football players. The wild card was the fifth guy, an androgynous musician who sat quietly at a keyboard for most of the piece, creating a background stew of hums and pings. Toward the end he picked up an electric guitar and broke into a corrosive, heavy metal blues break a la Jimi Hendrix. The four dancers responded, each with his own break-dance variation. It was like self-expressive American culture breaking into the traditional collectivism of east Asia. Hip-hop has conquered the world, and K-pop has embraced it.
“Nobody takes ballet any more,” sighed my companion, a former dancer, during the break after the first piece. “All they do is jump around and roll on the floor.” And sure enough, the pas de deux from Taiwan titled “…and, or…” featured acrobatic tumbles and off-balance leaps and lifts. The plot was familiar: boy chases girl and girl chases boy through every conceivable approach and avoidance. They share a nice little hug toward the end, but the conclusion is almost as ambivalent as the beginning. The innovation was in the casting —choreographer I-Ling Liu deliberately chose a small man and a taller woman — going not for gender reversal, she said, but gender equality. And in fact they seemed to be of equal strength, and were able to lift and throw each other around in turn. The dance was fast-moving, the moves were difficult and pulled off with elan, and it was performed successfully without any music. Liu said she wanted to challenge the audience to just watch the dance. We were up to it.
Japanese choreographer Ruri Mito and her eight-woman troupe closed the program on an ambitious but ambiguous note. In “Where we were Born,” Mito said she was trying to re-create the origins of life. In murky light, the women formed a moving blob that surged and swayed, peaked and fell, briefly broke up and quickly reformed. According to Mito the piece was made to be seen in the round, and it suffered on the square proscenium stage at Japan Society. It looked like the psycho-pathology of Japanese womanhood--- non-individuals lumped together, living a primitive existence in the dark.
I longed for the lights to come up and individual dancers to step out, but it wasn’t going to happen. So we saw one side of a blob that remains a mystery. Once again the ensemble dancing was impressive, a bit like an English sword dance where dancers are linked together, never let go and must move as a unit. But here you had little idea of what was going on inside the blob.
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| "Where we were born" Photo by Richard Termine |
As always, the program curated by Japan Society’s artistic director Yoko Shioya was on point — top quality dancing that reflected the current cultural turmoil of east Asia. Some Korean women are refusing to have anything to do with men, and Japan’s birth rate is cratering. Things may be more normal in Taiwan, at least until the Chinese invade. But whatever happens, hip-hop’s not going away.
Copyright 2025 by Tom Phillips
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