Takami & Mobu Dance Group's "Illusion 2"

Mobu Dance Group
SomArts Cultural Center
through Feb 3, 2008

Butoh is a strange thing. I'm starting to believe that you have to be in the right mood, in the right space, to really appreciate it. It's like entering an alien, slightly perverse and sometimes creepy world-- not an easy sell to your friends for a Saturday night date.

So, how do you put people in the right frame of mind? I haven't got any perfect answers, but I think that the setup at SomArts--where Takami and Mobu Dance Group have set up for a two-week run of Illusion 2--is on the right track.

Pre-show, you can wander through an art exhibition that includes a mesmerizing sound installation by Oliver diCicco called "Sirens," among other pieces scattered throughout the gallery. In this quiet mood, you wander down a path lit by Kana Tanaka's mesh of glowing dots and globes to the performance space, and decide which side of the stage you want to sit on: far or near.

The air in SomArts' space is a curious mix--a surreal stage world set into the sounds of real life. Sitting in the audience, you can hear the rush of cars speeding along the freeway overhead. There's the quiet echo of the voice of a guy at the front desk answering a phone call, and the opening quartet--for Takami, along with Monique Tajiri Goldwater, Mai Shimizu and Roberta Marguerite Chavez-- is lit only by the greenish glow of the two EXIT signs.

Slowly though, the freeway noises blend seamlessly into an atmospheric sound bed, and almost by accident, you are subsumed into a post-industrial forest. The women mirror each other, playing out episodes, some near and some far from the point of view of each side of the audience, and they pass through the space like ghosts passing through a looking glass.

Did you know it takes you eyes thirty minutes to adjust to the darkness? Thirty minutes, I think, is probably a good length for a butoh piece. For the--admittedly small--number of butoh pieces I've seen, I feel as though any longer and it becomes too difficult to sustain the concept. Illusion 2 is a little like my chess game, strong opener, but a bit weak on its middle game. At the manic duet between wildly giggling women I felt like we had somehow lost the concept of illusion.

Still, Illusion 2--which runs a little over an hour--has a lot going for it, especially in the visuals, with spectacular set pieces by Kana Tanaka that are well lit by Stephen Siegel. A marshland of glass stalks separate the upper and lower parts of the stage, while dangling rotating cones drift in circles, reflecting rings of light like a laserium show across the audience and stage alike, giving the impression of both fragility and ethereality to the whole piece.

A dancer pushes a rondel of cut glass and shards of dichroic filters into a pool of light and the play of colors it casts onto a screen ignites my mammalian fascination with bright, shiny things. Like Olafur Eliasson's mirrored geometric fantasies, Tanaka's light puzzles have a life of their own, one which transcends awkward, contrived moments (to get the rondel to the other side of the stage, two dancers have to haul the art piece up the steps, trying artfully to maintain butoh style in the process.)

On the whole, though, this is a tighter, more streamlined piece than the earlier Illusion, which I saw at Project Artaud last season. Most effective are moments when one half of the audience is able to observe and therefore comprehend only part of the illusion, an apt metaphor for life. I wouldn't like to give away the ending, which I found jarring, and perhaps unnecessary, but the final images left me with a lasting sense of disquieting serenity.