while going to a condition + Accumulated Layout: transcending the material

When I first studied WB Yeats’ poem _Among School Children_, I puzzled at the final line: “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” I read this line, and the entire poem, over and over before I let it go, not convinced that I had been able to decipher the mystery of Yeats’ question. But watching "Hiroaki Umeda":http://www.hiroakiumeda.com/ perform his two solos *while going to a condition* and *Accumulated Layout*, something fell into place and I felt as though I finally had a glimmer of understanding of what Yeats might have experienced that led him to his famous inquiry.

Umeda performed on January 22-24 at the Scotiabank Dance Centre as part of the "PuSH Festival":http://pushfestival.ca/index.php, and, although both choreographies were aesthetically spare, their ability to evoke profound images made this show an exciting, if understated, highlight of the Vancouver dance season.

In his unique dance style, Umeda brings together influences including butoh and hip hop alongside ballet and modern. I can’t say for sure if I saw the influence of any one style, and this was, for me, a strength of Umeda’s work. Instead of presenting the audience with butoh or ballet, Umeda successfully moved beyond the boundaries of genre and the limits of a given genre’s vocabulary. Instead, he presented a kind of internal journey whose aesthetic was strong and clear, yet abstract enough to allow the audience the space to dive into the dance and construct their own journey towards understanding these two pieces.

It is the sophistication of the abstraction of both works that leads me to think of Yeats’ words. What I saw was Umeda’s utter loss of himself and his ego in his dance. There was no ironic distance between him and his work, no self-conscious or overtly performative conceits to distract him or the audience. His physical self was at once strongly present but almost neutral in its ability to dissolve into the dance. Indeed, Umeda’s work had a quality that made me feel that the audience was not watching a performance as much as being invited to witness a ritual of sorts. In this sense, Umeda’s body was merely a vessel that transmitted a meaning or a feeling so deep that it could only be expressed by Umeda entering into a transcendental or ecstatic state in which the materiality of mere spectacle is surpassed

The first piece *while going to a condition*, opened with an ambient soundtrack that made me think at once of the noise of static and the sounds of crickets chirping on a summer night. The crickets lose out to the static, and the rest of the piece seems to suggest an exploration of the relationship between humans and technology. Dramatic light cues dominate the work, creating a look on the bare back wall of the stage reminiscent of the horizontal and vertical lines of a television on the fritz. The strobe lights and heavy sound cues could have dominated the piece by driving the choreography, but instead Umeda’s precision and his strength as a performer allow for the entire piece to fall together into a unified gestalt whose steady pace leave the piece beautifully free of the melodrama that could easily be evoked if any of the aesthetic or thematic elements of this work were allowed to become imperious. Rather than resort to dramatics, Umeda controls all aspects of *while going to a condition* balancing music and light, dance and dancer to offer up a piece that is, in its balanced state, capable of transcending the sum of its parts.

I could easily imagine that, as they are so abstract, *while going to a condition* and *Accumulated Layout* may not be everyone’s cup of tea. Still, there is something about this type of dance, when it succeeds, that I find to be moving in a way that more conventional spectacle is not. I think it is exactly the abstract or esoteric nature of such pieces that I love; they open a door to the immaterial world of emotion or the spirit, without feeling obliged to spell out the exact meaning that is meant to be derived. Such pieces rely on the power of metaphor, the evocative language of suggestion. They challenge the audience members to create along with the performers, breaking down the categories of audience and dancer.

Watching the pace and the mood of these two solos, I was reminded of my studies again. In ancient Japan, according to classes I took at university on Japanese theatre, there was a very early mode of performance called Kagura in which a shaman would be called upon by her (it was usually a woman or girl) fellow villagers to enter into a trance in order to communicate with the gods to bring, for example, a good harvest. All of the village would come to watch this event as though it were a performance. In today’s vocabulary, it would probably be called a sacred ritual that brought together the spirit and material worlds through the shaman’s ability to transcend her usual state of materiality. Such is the power of Umeda’s work, I feel that he enters into that ecstatic state, communicating on behalf of his audience, with whatever spirit world might be present in a Vancouver venue.
Another aspect of both *while going to a condition* and *Accumulated layout* that I admired was that both pieces are unafraid of stillness. Umeda has clearly mastered the concept of pace. This mastery is conveyed through his fearlessness with respect to slowness, repetition and timing in general. I’ve often seen shows where choreographers seem, almost compulsively, to rush to the climax, not allowing the audience an opportunity to fully enter into the world of the dance and then not allowing them at the end the opportunity to return to the world outside the dance. Alternately, I have seen countless choreographies that go on much longer than their message requires. Both of Umeda’s choreographies had a respect for form that is uncommon; in fact I was reminded of one last thing from my studies, and this is the _Jo- Ha-Kyu_ format that was created for ¬_Noh_ theatre by Noh’s patriarch, Zeami. He describes this tripartite form as being similar to a small stream (_Jo_) that becomes a great river (_Ha_) that finally becomes a waterfall (_Kyu_) crashing into a tranquil pond. I observed this form particularly with *while going to a condition* whose quiet intensity grows into a controlled storm that allows Umeda to evoke a world of meaning with a flick or his wrist or the tilt of his head before the storm resolves, quite naturally, into a tranquil calm. *Accumulated Layout* follows a similar format, though I found the latter piece to be more subtle in its aesthetic. Still, it too evokes the dancer’s dreamland and the primordial depths of human life even as it is pitted against contemporary technology.
This depth is the thing that makes Umeda’s work impressive. In addition to his technical skill as a dancer, and his intelligent use of the arts of lights, costume and sound, he manages to use all these things to plumb the depths of meaning, to explore humanity’s common emotions and to surpass the world of the material. During the intermission, I caught a glimpse of Umeda racing out from backstage to get a bottle of water; as he’d already swept me up in his transcendent journey, I felt almost surprised to see that he was, after all, merely human, a dancer.

_while going to a condition; Choreographer & Dancer Hiroaki Umeda; Sound, Visual Creation and Production: S20. Accumulated Layout; Choreographer & Dancer Hiroaki Umeda; Sound, Visual Creation and Production: Théâtre national de Chaillot and S20 with the support of La Chaufferie (DCA), Saint-Denis. Dance “here”: http://pushfestival.ca/index.php?mpage=shows&spage=main&id=60#show for more information._