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.

SF Symphony: Messiaen's L'Ascension

Every so often we get to the Symphony in between dance performances, and we didn't want to miss out on a chance to hear some Messiaen. So on a dreadfully drippy night, we squished in our soaked shoes over to Davies to hear Myung-Whun Chung conduct the San Francisco Symphony.

Messiaen is, for me, always a bit of a mixed experience. Sometimes I don't know what to make of him, sometimes I'm just blown away. L'Ascension is certainly not an easy work-- it moves through four movements at a glacial pace, and yet, Chung managed to uncover fantastic, spine-tingling episodes in the Alleluias. I found myself completely absorbed in a sort of frozen moment in time, which I guess, is Messiaen's mission.

By contrast, Chung's Mahler was a mixed bag for me. Bringing Mahler to SF is like coals to Newcastle, and I'm very much attached to MTT's interpretation, which seems to "sing" more than the version we heard on Friday night.

Chung takes the "Langsam. Schleppend" (Slow. Dragging.) directive quite literally-- to the point of schlepping dullness for me. It seems his motive is to create a contrast with the frenzied pace that he takes in the accelerandos, which was in some ways effective, but also started to sound schizophrenic to me. Who is this crazy guy whipping the musicians around up there?

By the third movement, the orchestra had taken on a richer slow burn-- a tone set by Scott Pingel's burnished double bass solo. Chung eschews the breathy "wait for it..." pauses that MTT takes, and to which I've grown accustomed, and it's a bit of a pity, because I think that his fourth movement lacks a certain logic-- under his baton, the symphony plays beautifully -- but it is just not as expressive an organism.

Spoon & Katie Faulkner's little seismic dance: Filaments & Derivatives

Filaments & Derivatives
Spoon & little seismic dance
at CounterPULSE
January 18-20, 2008

The diminutive but versatile CounterPULSE space was crammed to the rafters, literally, for a Saturday night show of Filaments & Derivatives, a collaborative evening put together by Kegan Marling and Jane Schnorrenberg's Spoon and Katie Faulkner's little seismic dance.

All the attention seems wholly warranted -- after all, Faulkner's 2006 season in the same space generated a rare excitement with her polished presentation and multi-faceted program. I remember after seeing her show, I had the most satisfying kind of question in my mind, what would she do next?

Marling opened the evening with his solo Memory, a mannered, mildly humorous assemblage of eccentricities and peculiarities. If there's a confused pause at the start -- is this piece really serious or not?-- it's quickly dispelled by the opening bars of Irene Cara's "What a Feeling." Marling plays it all straight though, from the jerky marionette moves to the unnerving, pigeon-like gaze at the audience, and it's lifted from garden-variety dance, of the sort I used to see at college, by Marling's athletic grace.

Faulkner makes another foray into film with Loom, a rather sweet chronicle of the romantic ups and downs of a couple, played by Faulkner herself and ODC/SF's Private Freeman. The concept of the film, which gives the sense of falling from one scene into the next through still photographs, will be familiar to anyone who pays attention to HP ads, but Faulkner edits effectively, skillfully weaving threads of humor and non-linear sequiturs throughout.

Spoon premiered The Derivatives immediately afterward, but unfortunately after the larger-than-life Loom, this new work had a rather pedestrian air. Marling and Schnorrenberg, joined by Ross Hollenkamp and Rebecca Johnson, seemed to lack the energy to match their chosen score-- a mix that ranged from Philip Glass to Osvaldo Golijov to Cibo Matto--which was a pity because, at times, the bolts and catches of the partnering held the promise of developing into something meaty.

Similarly, Faulkner's Imprint, a moody kaleidoscope of shifting patterns for Carl Bellinghausen, Rebecca Gilbert, Heather Glabe and Chelsea Taylor, had moments of clarity, but ultimately looked like a work still under development.

Far stronger was Faulkner's unusual The Dry Line, which closed the hourlong program. Across a video projection of a storm approaching a lonely, weathered barn a trio women--Stephanie Ballas, Janet Das, and Marlena Penney Oden--drift like Fates, or weird sisters manufacturing a dream world. Faulkner's movement here is clean and definite, with a bit of An Afternoon of a Faun in the isolinear movements and flattened hands that look like they are drawn from ancient Egyptian paintings. The only danger with this piece is that the women, all strong performers, nevertheless are somewhat swallowed up by the video, which occasionally distracts the eye away from the people losing in the process some of the subtleties of their intricate trio. And after all, when all is said and done, it's Faulkner's choreography that I want to remember.