Ame
to Ame (Candy and Rain)
at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts,
SF
"Call them postmodern, postminimalist Butoh artists and you might
come close to capturing the style of inkBoat. Or call them nothing at
all and allow yourself to be seduced by the absorbing Ame to Ame (Candy
and Rain), a two-person performance piece which the company is presenting
through next weekend at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum in San Francisco.
The odd spelling of the company’s name partakes of the low-rent
quirkiness of certain sectors of the avant-garde. Yet, respects other
than orthography, inkBoat is an original.
The troupe was founded by Shinichi Momo Koga in 1994 and has found a multlidisciplinary
dance and theater audience.. Koga was a student of Bay Area residents,
Hiroko and Koichi Tamano, who had been disciples of Tatasumi Hijikata,
the progenitor of the postwar Japanese expressionist dance of apocalypse
we know as Butoh. Koga has been joined in this latest venture by Yuko
Kaseki, a freelance dancer who has worked extensively in Germany and Japan.
Completing the team are composer Sheila Denise McCarthy and Marc Ates,
listed in the inkBoat promotional material as "director/choreographer/light
design."
This mix of sensibilities is genuinely interesting; and what keeps one
fascinated during the one-act, 55-minute Ame to Ame is the combination
of technical mastery and the dark vein of humor that runs through the
performances by Koga and Kaseki. On Saturday (Aug. 7), they suggested
that Butoh has evolved in a way that its anguished patriarch never could
have predicted a half century ago.
Ame to Ame begins like more Butoh dances than you would care to name.
Koga, a buffed fellow with a top knot, dressed shirtless in a white lounge
suit; and Kaseki, in a white, ruffled number, move cautiously through
limited trajectories, careful to avoid colliding both with each other
and the furniture - a chair, a stool and a table. Koga contorts his hands
into weird shapes. Kaseki, a perky, doll-like performer, makes grotesque
faces, not omitting the silent scream that has become an icon of the Butoh
school.
All, however, is not quite traditional. After this slow-as-molasses prologue,
the couple leans into martial arts postures and suddenly, they’re
leaping and diving all over the space. What follows is 40 minutes of superb
physical comedy. Some of it is classic mime material. One dancer leans
chin and elbow on table; the other dancer whisks the table away and the
first dancer hangs in space. The tables, so to speak, are turned, and
a withdrawn chair finds Koga’s posterior defying gravity.
Yet, there’s a natural empathy here, as the pair’s movements
acquire a mirror relationship. The piece stresses contrasts. Movement
is either graduated or manic. Isolated extremities, like flexed feet,
succeed the turbulent deployment of the entire hurtling body. Episodes
of silence follow volleys of percussive music; throughout Ame to Ame,
the choice of music (McCarthy intersperses bits by Nils Frykdahl, Dawn
McCarthy, Carla Kilstedt and Matthias Bossi with her own compositions)
is eminently apt; while Ates’ unerring lighting scheme keeps us
dazzled.
The choreography grows ever less studied and more physical. Koga and Kaseki
mount each other’s back. He beetles across the stage in a squatty
walk that Chaplin might have envied, and they end with that most socialized
and stylized of dance forms, a waltz. That inkBoat does not and cannot
completely control the meaning of its choreography, that rigor must ultimately
yield to the spontaneous, is the most winning aspect of Ame to Ame.
~ALLAN ULRICH,
Voice of Dance, August 10, 2004
Ame
to Ame (Candy and Rain): Remarkable return
at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF
"Yuko Kaseki and Shinichi Momo Koga, the Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire
of Butoh, come together in inkBoat's Ame to Ame (Candy and Rain) at Yerba
Buena Center for the Arts. The duet marks a return of sorts. Berkeley-based
inkBoat's choreographer-dancer Koga, founder of the 10-year-old dance-theater
company, was 2002's Wattis artist in residence at Yerba Buena Center.
This relationship culminated in November of that year with Onion, a remarkably
ambitious and memorable premiere that seemed to fuse Butoh and Beckett
into a compellingly original theatrical pantomime. Onion, which featured
Berlin-based choreographer-dancer Kaseki and Koga, enjoyed much too brief
a run at the time, though it went on to tour the United States and Europe.
Ame to Ame reunites Koga and Kaseki in Yerba Buena Center's ample performance
space, under the direction of fellow choreographer and lighting designer
Marc Ates. While a more modest piece in size and scope, Ame to Ame shows
off a unique, ongoing, and altogether impressive collaboration in a brilliantly
focused work, whose playful humor, sensuality, romance, and flecks of
pop culture wend their comical, invitingly human way across a cold and
mysterious alienation. The set consists of three simple items of furniture
(a chair, a stool, and a table, all painted white), each at the outset
enveloped in its own circle of light – an economy of forms that
gives surprising rein to the performers – as the characters take
their first incongruous steps around one another: a woman, perhaps a girl,
dressed in a short white dress and white knee socks – her kawaii
image distorts demonically from time to time like a Yoshitomo Nara cartoon
– initially teeters in place at center stage as a man, barefoot
in white pants and a white blazer, slinks backward slowly from right to
left behind her. The sense that each remains in his or her own world,
oblivious of one another, is momentarily exploded by the gesture of the
man briefly, casually supporting the woman's fall without breaking his
stride.
From there the piece moves through a series of scenes whose contrasting
moods and tempos freely incorporate elements of modern, jazz, and popular
dance, all with captivating grace and precision. Gestures are abstracted
into a precise vocabulary of mindless routine, physical and spiritual
weariness, or manic excitement (one movement looks like shaking a drink
mixer, another like repeatedly sticking a wet finger in a light socket)
as the characters come together and fly apart in various ways. One passage
early on has all the appealing familiarity of a classic vaudeville sketch,
refracted as always through a distinctive Butoh lens, as the table gets
swiped back and forth by characters who would use it as a pillow. It even
resolves on an unabashedly sentimental note.
Throughout, Ates's radiant and kinetic lighting design casts different
shades, shapes, and textures of white light about the stage, while the
score (always an elemental force in an inkBoat performance) unfurls lonely,
lovely landscapes of sound from composer Sheila McCarthy, with added compositions
by local musical giants Carla Kihlstedt, Dawn McCarthy, Nils Frykdahl,
and Matthias Bossi (including two exquisite songs previously released
under the name Faun Fables). McCarthy's lush electronic-percussive music
both propels and cradles the dancers' movements. It's effervescently driving
and quirky during passages of frenetic movement and blends startlingly
with the darker passages (like placing a shell to your ear and hearing
delicate metal leaves blowing around some deserted alternate universe).
Time speeds up and then slows, the greed of sleep gives way to the gallantry
of concern, and childlike play and sexual prowess whirl around fleeting
contacts between bodies and personalities. Such contrasts and more are
beautifully managed throughout, frequently with humor either wry or raucous.
The couple waltz drunkenly to the end of time, a final song sending somber,
wistful lyrics washing over them. Words become inarticulate notes, rising
in pitch, expanding in power (opening up a yawning space between the lovers),
and dissolving into an undulating wall of music built steadily upward,
tsunami-like, only to be brought crashing down again – as now two
fading points of light circumscribe two alien but remembering bodies –
in a chilling, howling vortex of sound.
~Robert Avila,
SF Bay Guardian, August 11, 2004
Ame
to Ame (Candy and Rain)
at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF
"'Romance' isn't a word usually associated with the Japanese dance
form butoh, but inkBoat's "Ame to Ame (Candy and Rain)," which
opened Friday at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and repeats this
weekend, manages to pull heartstrings while posing profoundly philosophical
questions . . .
. . .the core of the work is the dance performances. The petite Kaseki,
in her Carnaby Street Mod white minidress and knee socks, is like a wise
child. Koga is an extraordinarily focused performer with a long face capable
of resembling a gargoyle one moment and the visage in Edward Munch's "The
Scream" the next. The unfailing intensity of their connection only
underlines the tragedy of their psychic individuality."
~Rachel Howard, SF Chronicle, August 9, 2004
Ame
to Ame (Candy and Rain)
at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF
"A couple, bound for the opera, wandered into the Forum by mistake,
then dashed out minutes before inkBoat’s latest production, Ame
to Ame (Candy and Rain) began. Had they stayed, they would have found
the U.S. premiere of Shinichi Iova-Koga and Yuko Kaseki’s work operatic
in its own way. While the only libretto was a panoply of keen gestures,
extreme facial expressions, and Harpo-style physical maneuvers, the dancers’
bodies sang out the physical equivalent of songs—broken, dissonant,
and often hilarious. Although there was no translation of these nonverbal
arias, the dancers formed a portrait of mysterious yearning and frustration
that was by turns comic, lyrical, ghoulish, and haunting.
InkBoat’s performers and collaborators, who work in both San Francisco
and Berlin, push butoh away from ankoku butoh (the post-World War II dance
of darkness) toward the more intimate form of “one dancer, one school”
and “cheerful apocalypse” that was developed by Akaji Maro
of Dairakudakan. While death still lurks, Koga, Kaseki, and director/choreographer/lighting
designer Marc Ates use it to wrestle the solitary angels and lonely demons
of self and other rather than nuclear apocalypse.
And wrestle they did. In white light ethereally littered with a white
chair, table, and stool, the dancers, also in white, careered through
space like sleepwalkers whose separate dreams repeatedly collided. Kaseki
teetered across the stage, Koga caught and turned her, and eventually
the pair moved on with affect-less drama. From beautifully crafted dreamy
vignettes, accompanied by intriguing, edgy sound (by Sheila McCarthy,
Dawn McCarthy, Carla Kihlstedt, and Nils Frykdahl), the couple exploded
into grotesque play, bouncing belly to belly, high-stepping, flailing,
and grimacing. From there they swung back into movement of refined sensitivity
and timing, as when Kaseki sensuously laid her hands and head down on
the tabletop and Koga pulled the table out from under her, leaving her
poised exactly as she had been, now framing negative space. One of the
most moving, tender moments of the evening arose when Koga used the three
white props as stepping-stones for a somnolent Kaseki’s blind travel,
the two like clowns in a wordless Beckett play.
“On a good day, candy falls like rain,” a voice said. “Ame”
means “candy” as well as “rain,” and both are
often sweet and welcome. So was this performance.”
~Ann Murphy, DANCE MAGAZINE
Love
is Shock
at New York Butoh Festival, 2003
Shinichi Momo Koga completed the evening with the gracefully designed
Love is Shock. Hiding under mounds of a gorgeous fabric cloak, he softly
blew a white kerchief from his face and peaked out curiously. A charming
presence, he was rooted but levitating; within this tiny gem of a dance
a path from dark to light moved like a stream. Eventually, letting down
the burden of his cloak, he stomped on it as he turned in a slow circle.
I overheard an audience member say "I want to marry that dance."
~Alissa Cardone, The Brooklyn Rail, February 2004
‘Black Map’,
the work in progress version of "The Crow Line"
at Dance Mission Theater, SFAIF, June/July 2005
The program, Black Map, with blank verse attributed to Cassie Terman,
lists Shinichi Momo Koga for concept, direction and performance with Hiroko
Sadamori as butoh exponent and Dohee Lee for Korean Drum and Voice. Sound
and light design were attributed to Sheila McCarthy. inkBoat, based in
Berkeley, has a clear butoh ethic, and a company which captivated a number
of my professional colleagues, particularly some with whom I shared membership
on the Isadora Duncan Dance Award Committee. So I was not surprised to
see it listed on the performance roster of the San Francisco International
Arts Festival with its principal, Shinichi Koga providing the face on
this year’s posters and postcards, strong, sensitive, handsomely
proportioned.
What was surprising was that inkBoat presented Black Map as a work in
progress, to be completed in the summer of 2006. This truncated version
meant inkBoat shared only half of a two-hour slot starting at 7:30 to
be followed by two other local performers scheduled for 9:30. This time
slot allotment procedure recalled the dance/music marathon which occurs
in Chennai (one-time Madras) every December and January with the classical
music and dance traditions of South India; occasional guest appearances
from other Indian classical forms and an even more occasional invited
Westerner to lecture or demonstrate are included.
The Black Map excerpt was remarkably simple and evocatively lit. We saw
first Koga with his back to us standing on coils of white rope, their
circumference worthy of restraining a major ship. Koga’s body, mid-adolescent
in silhouette, drooped as if swinging from a gallows, black coat askew,
white shirt dribbling below the coat hem. Black Out.
In a lateral line accented by dusky lighting, Sadamori began to traverse
the space from stage left to stage right in a crouching, crawling movement,
each bare foot negotiating the hem of the shapeless black garment covering
her humping posture, her left hand holding an instrument possessed of
two rows of bells attached to a central wood staff painted red, said instrument
used in Shinto rituals. Periodically Sadamori shook the bells as she traversed
the space; her hair drawn up into a minuscule bun, the effect like a hair
ball from a brush tossed into a dust bin. Watching her toes negotiating
from under the faded black, flexing, placing themselves one step at a
time, propelling the shapeless hump, was mesmerizing. Just past center
stage Sadamori paused, looking around with combined fear and suspicion.
In breaking from the repetition, timing and effect was perfect. A few
steps more and she vanished into the wings.
In the semi-dark, we glimpsed a gowned female figure in mid-stage left.
Before the lights went up she emitted incredible sounds, rough, extreme
in range, as if the voice was attempting to move a mouth of pebbles, up,
down, left, right, crosswise. I thought I heard some Korean pa’n
sori. The light brightened, the figure came forward in a sleeveless black
gown, accented by white inserts in the skirt. Dohee Lee began to move;
with the arc of the hands, position of the arms and inflection of the
shoulders, the impression of Korean training deepened. Her face an oval
of delicacy and strength enjoyed by some Korean women, Lee looked steadily,
impassively at the audience, adding to the cultural complexity, an upright
mysterious addition to the earlier two sections, a shamaness in nightclub
attire.
Another blackout before Koga staggered diagonally toward stage left front
struggling with the rope about his neck, his slender eloquent hands, probably
adept at classical Asian calligraphy, executing aerial pictographs of
protest. His head was shaved except for the Ching Dynasty Chinese-like
queue which seemed to start higher than the authentic variety. As visual
comment on Gold Mountain, the original Chinese name for San Francisco,
it was an added acidic flavor.
With his extremely flexible body, Koga struggled, nearly freed himself,
then began to retreat. Lee emerged again, this time with an arm-sized
drum, slung from her neck in a twisting white chord and holding two sticks.
Standing in almost the same location where she danced, Lee began to hit
the sides of the drum, her rhythm building gradually, marked by theatrical
phrasing of her arms lifting in pauses before changing tempo, or area
of the drum struck.
As if a march to the guillotine was announced by each sound, Koga managed
to tangle himself in the rope while his hands made delicate, futile protests.
He reached the coiled rope, and while an extremely soupy set of lyrics
was heard over the broadcast system, Koga fell onto the rope and from
a womb-like crouch gradually stretched to inertness. As Koga’s body
settled onto this lump of white, Sadamori lurched from upstage right in
a lingerie-strapped black cocktail dress, Shinto bells replaced by a bottle.
She wove and stumbled her way towards Koga, located him; while the maudlin
lines were sung about finding one’s soul mate or whatever was proclaimed,
in a series off-balance pitched movements, Sadamori lowered herself to
his side, providing him and the audience with a quintessential inebriated
embrace before the blackout.
by Renee Renouf,
Ballet Magazine, June/July 2005
Heavens' Radio: Butoh finds a lighter side
at Venue 9, SF, June 2003
"inkBoat
presented a two-weekend run of the spellbinding and dreamy Heaven's Radio,
Allen Willner's adaptation of Samuel Beckett's radio play All That Fall.
Beckett, the laconic playwright in whose works language hides more than
it expresses, is a natural for a Butoh interpretation, and three of the
Bay Area's best Butoh practitioners, Koga, Tanya Calamoneri, and Kinji
Hayashi, shared Footloose's tiny stage. A central character, Calamoneri's
old woman, listened to the radio for signs of life, much the way astronomers
listen to noise from outer space ñ as a way of trying to get in
touch with a reality. Koga never looked as good as he does under Willner's
firm direction, performing the Trickster who held the proverbial key,
i.e., the egg from which life could emerge if its shell were to be shattered.
And then there was Hayashi's Pink Baby, round and naked like an egg forever
almost being born."
~Rita Feliciano, SF Bay Guardian, June 2003
Onion
at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF
…half trembling, half laughing affirmation of self, embracing history
and mortality.
At the premiere last November of Onion by inkBoat, the scene before the
assembling audience offered a Beckett-like tableau. On a dusty landscape
atop a raised platform stage, a narcoleptic man (Shinichi Momo Koga) and
woman (Yuko Kaseki) in peasant dress repose in something like mute bewilderment
or exhaustion. The woman blankly stares outward, sitting on a foldout
chair strapped to the back of her companion, who is initially obscured,
doubled over and facing the other direction. As the audience settles in
its seats, the man slowly rises and lumbers around under the strain of
his load, while the woman remains limp and oblivious in her chair. They
proceed to act out a series of scenarios beneath an enormous tower, crowned
by a mumbling writer (Sten Rudstroem) in a bird’s nest, alternately
clicking away at his typewriter and peering at the scene below –
sometimes influencing the action with typewritten pages flung down a wire
into the earth, other times only observing – while an arm (Haruko
Nishimura) pushes onions, a radio, and a kettle through trapdoors in the
floor, further spurring the man and woman on through a continuum of contortions
and confrontations. In this existential landscape, the dancers, with an
exacting and flawless technique, effectively limn ineffable states of
consciousness with precise gestures and flashes of genuine humor that
catch one completely off guard.
Part of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts “ Bay Area Now”
series; Onion marked the Berkeley-based inkBoat’s most ambitious
effort to date. Culminating Koga’s term as their Wattis Artist in
Residence, the piece included an exquisite and elaborate stage (Frank
Lee/Mary Lois Hare) and sound design (Dan Rathbun) that took supreme advantage
of the Center for the Arts’ sizable auditorium. Onion combines various
performance techniques, including Butoh and improvisation, in a deceptively
simple, thematically rich narrative advanced largely through movement
and the lush ambient score by Carla Kihlstedt and Dan Rathbun (two members
of the East Bay’s avant-garde music group Sleepytime Gorilla Museum).
A vivid yet nearly wordless work of unusual subtlety and force, Onion
will tour the United States and Europe in 2004.
~Robert Avila, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Jan. 1, 2003
Onion: Laying down roots
at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF
Shinichi Momo Koga calls it his "onion obsession."
"It just seems to come back again and again
in my consciousness," he says between rehearsals at the Yerba Buena
Center for the Arts.
A decade ago, the 34-year-old dancer/actor made
a short film called "The Onion Cellar," "about a group
of people who gather to cut onions so that they can cry, because they
are emotionally barren and don't have a release anymore," he explains.
Today onions are flying, springing through a trap
door in the raised stage Koga's constructed during a residency at the
center's Forum. He and partner Yuko Kaseki (sitting in a chair strapped
onto Koga's back) continue their slow, hunched, exquisitely contorted
dance unfazed by the pelting of root vegetables, just as they will Thursday
when Koga's company inkBoat gives "Onion" its premiere here
as part of Bay Area Now 3.
"There's an issue of things you keep buried,
and things you don't let come out," the half-Japanese former San
Francisco State film student says during lunch break. "And the onion
is metaphorically used to bring buried elements to the surface."
The onion is not the only quirky image to preoccupy
Koga's imagination. Last year inkBoat's show "Cockroach" ran
for three weeks at the former Theater Artaud, proving that Koga is a San
Francisco talent to watch. A journey through the dark mind of an obsessively
prim lover (played with face-rippling intensity by Koga himself), the
production was a stunning integration of avant-garde music, surreal sets
and costumes, and psychological drama.
But though Koga founded the earliest incarnation
of inkBoat in 1994, his work has yet to reach a wide audience in San Francisco,
probably because it is so difficult to categorize. The son of visual artists,
Koga trained in the deeply imagistic Tadashi Suzuki Theater Method but
considered acting something he did on the side while getting his undergraduate
degree in photography at California Polytechnic.
He came to San Francisco and met Koichi and Hiroko
Tamano -- practitioners of that post-World War II, imagination-driven
form of Japanese dance known as butoh -- in 1991, and soon joined their
company. But he doesn't consider his work butoh.
"I wouldn't advertise this as a butoh piece
even though that is my main background and training," he says. "I'm
trying to bring more everyday life elements into it, more human interaction.
Probably the best thing to call us is 'interdisciplinary' -- although
that can also be misleading."
In fact, Koga is far more tapped into the local
music scene than he is to either the dance or theater communities. He
met his longtime musical collaborators -- Carla Kihlstedt, Dan Rathburn
and Nils Frykdahl of the Oakland band Sleepytime Gorilla Museum -- while
shopping for records at Rasputin Music.
The musicians often have played their spare, haunting
music live as characters in the show -- for "Cockroach" they
looked like ashen grave-diggers, running across the stage to strike enormous
hanging pipes and create a climactic cacophony. But for "Onion"
they have recorded their music, in hopes that the show will go on to tour.
It won't be the first time Koga's work has been
seen in far-off places. He's had great success with the European circuit,
performing and teaching in Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Holland,
Italy, France and Austria, and he now resides half a year in Berlin. But
the United States has been another matter.
"I've done everything guerilla style,"
Koga says. "I started here in the streets, and have done small theaters
where I could, and I could continue that attitude in Europe because I
could get gigs there quickly. But here it's slower. People have to see
you for a long time before they trust you in a theater, and they have
to feel some history, I think."
Now Koga's work is beginning to get seen here
-- last year inkBoat was chosen for the Seattle Butoh Festival -- and
Koga is thinking long-term. He'd like more time together for his bicontinental
group of performers ("Onion's" other three dancer/actors are
from Germany and Japan), who work together when they can on the 20- by
12-foot stage Koga's built in his Berkeley warehouse space.
"I'm the initiator of the work -- I put the
framework on it -- but we're making it together," Koga says of their
collaboration. "It's about finding out not just about yourself but
your relationship to other people. It's a basic human thing."
~RACHEL HOWARD, SF Examiner, 11/05/2002
Cockroach
at Theater Artaud, SF
Blood, earth, water, breath. Local choreographer Shinichi Momo Koga directs
interdisciplinary performance troupe inkBoat through a death march of
the cataleptic soul in "Cockroach," an Eastern variation on
a Kafkaesque nightmare in which a broken man, haunted by veiled memories
of regret and desire, refuses to go gentle into the night. The problem
is he's arguably been dead his whole life. But unwilling to accept his
fate, he tortures himself in his last moments with fragmented visions
of his headless bride, whose longing for intimacy he could never match.
Warped limbs and spines, exaggerated hand gestures, anguished faces. These
images in inkBoat's solos and partnering vignettes, which comprise the
backbone of the choreography, stem from Japanese butoh, the post-war avant-garde
movement school that draws its power from the internal combustion of introspection.
Other fiery elements in the piece include a trio of ragged dancers, perhaps
representing the Furies, who torment our fallen hero, screeching like
snake-tongued banshees, poking at him with hot wires, mimicking his decay
by dangling their own bloody tentacles from the wings of the stage.
Founded in 1994, the Bay Area-based inkBoat strives for what Koga calls
"an alchemy of forms, creating relationships between Asian and Western
movement, theater and music styles." In "Cockroach," the
abstract drama uses cinematic devices - from still frames to slow motion
to car-chase velocity - and improvisatory techniques, derived from Koga's
study of Action Theater, to create a natural ebb and flow in the tension.
The music acts as a central character in the piece as well. Performed
live on mostly homemade instruments and found objects by a quartet that
includes avant-rockers Nils Frykdahl and Dan Rathbun of Sleepytime Gorilla
Museum, the deeply percussive soundtrack echoes both the din of an industrial
junkyard and the tuneful symphonic beats of 20th-century classical maven
Iannis Xenakis. Cold, metallic, and eerie, the score heightens the dance's
sense of loss and unbearable sorrow.
Though largely a serious work, flashes of dark existentialist comedy emerge,
e.g., when the estranged wife slaps the broken man and when she erupts
into a fit of absurd giddiness. But much like the unexpected humor in
Kafka's stories, these events trigger a quick chuckle, then an
uneasiness sets in, which mirrors the dying man's uncomfortable metamorphosis
into frog, lizard, snake, insect - as if only devolution will save his
empty soul.
- Sam Prestianni, SF Weekly, November 2001
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