Kokoro Dance L.S.D.: submerged passion
Kokoro Dance
In the post-performance artist talk-back after Kokoro Dance's "Love, Sex, and Death" performance, choreographer Barbara Bourget spoke of fusing butoh and flamenco. This idea is visible in the movements of the dancers who combined butoh-style articulated, slow-movements with flexed feet and rounded arms, with the fierce foot-stamping and proud motions of flamenco. They were accompanied by a sound track of luminous, emotional trumpet, sparse piano, intricate guitar, and rich lines of melody carried by the cello.
The most impressive aspect of the performance was not any one set of motions, but the total effect of six performers dancing not-quite-simultaneously. Bourget described this as six solos occurring at the same time. The result was something organic and visually captivating, like watching a flock of birds move across the sky. The dancers shared a vocabulary and were clearly part of a unified whole, but their movements were individuated. There was infinite variety for the eye, as each dancer carried her own thread in the whole. It was akin to looking at an abstract expressionist painting -- say one Jean Paul Riopelle's Compositions – something nearly monochromatic and uniform, yet infinitely varied in its details. The comparison to the painting holds too in the way that the dancers, occupying a small stage with their arcs and turned wrists, cut up negative space with their bodies, creating contrasts between movement and emptiness.
Less apparent to me is the relationship of this movement, if any, to the emotional or conceptual side of butoh. In my (limited) understanding, butoh is an intensely inquisitive and demanding art form, one that asks performers to put themselves at the mercy of both movement and the concepts behind movement, tapping into their own suffering, passion, and energy and out of this creating a unique performance. Traditional butoh has been described as “...shocking, provocative, physical, spiritual, erotic, grotesque, violent, cosmic, nihilistic, cathartic, mysterious” -- as well as impossible to define (Boyce-Wilkinson). I am not sure how this tradition is tied to work of Kokoro Dance, a self-proclaimed “post-butoh” dance company, in "L.S.D." Does this mean that only shape, gesture, and mood are retained, while the eccentric and painful emotional explorations of traditional butoh are relinquished? L.S.D seemed to have a formal relationship to butoh, but felt quite emotionally restrained.
I very much felt that I was watching a work in progress, which L.S.D is -- a collaboration with Flamenco Rosario will be completed in 2011. Dancers were deft and clear in their movements, but conceptual elements seemed submerged. For all the emphasis in the title on human passions and instinctive forces, their representation in "L.S.D." struck me as cerebral. This is not necessarily a negative -- when bringing heavy guns of human passion, it seems best to treat the ideas thoughtfully rather than charging headlong into cliché. There was no fear of cliché in "L.S.D.," but perhaps instead the piece erred on the side of caution, by failing to wholly articulate its content.
Traditions aside "L.S.D." is a beautiful, visually compelling piece of dance.