The Unknown Dancer

"The Unknown Dancer in the Neighborhood"
Written and Directed by Suguru Yamamoto
Japan Society, New York
January 10, 2020

-- By Tom Phillips

Wataru Kitao as the Unknown Dancer.

                                    
Mayday! Mayday! Is a cry that comes up repeatedly in Suguru Yamamoto’s dance/drama “The Unknown Dancer in the Neighborhood.” It means “help me” in French, but it seems to fall on deaf ears in Tokyo, the setting for this theater piece by and for a new generation of Japanese artists.

Despairing dramas about alienated people were a staple of the last century.  What makes this fresh is that it suggests alienation is actually the flip side of community. We feel disconnected only because we're connected.



“The Unknown Dancer” is a whole cast of characters, played by one brilliant young dancer-actor, Wataru Kitao, equally at home with hip-hop and ballet, in male and female roles, as a child or an old person, as a human being or an animal. The ability to cross so many lines is a feat of acting empathy – the very opposite of disconnecting.

Hip-Hop Round-trip: London to NY

"Blak Whyte Gray"
Boy Blue:  Michael "Mikey J" Asante, Creative Direction and Music; Kenrick "H2O" Sandy, Choreography
Lincoln Center White Light Festival 
November 16, 2018

-- By Tom Phillips 

"Whyte" 

Members of Boy Blue held a post-performance chat last night after the US premiere of "Blak Whyte Gray," and it was a shock to hear their British accents. Their intense and acrobatic hip-hop dancing was straight from the streets of New York -- having made a round trip from east London.

Flipping the usual progression from darkness to light, this young British troupe gives us a three-part journey of liberation that starts with "Whyte" and ends with "Blak." The progress is upward, from a kind of enslavement to a celebration of strength and freedom.  But the opening depiction of present-day slavery seemed the most relevant to an American audience.