Japanese contemporary dancer Uno Man and his kinesthetically intense company of four men stretched, bent and upended our conventions of modern dance when they performed Wednesday night at the Japan Information and Culture Center. Man is an exponent of butoh, a post-World War II dance form that rose out of an attempt to create a modern and uniquely Japanese movement vocabulary. His work makes time pass like pages being slowly turned. He makes silence sound by sensitizing our ears to the smallest swish or rip. He reverses our sense of beginning and end by forging a sense of anticipation at conclusions.
His composition "Hot Key" (1991) was a 1 1/2-hour exercise in composed angst. It is based on a series of 10 pictures of cows and herdsmen from a 12th-century Zen instruction manual. The drawings depict the ways in which human beings pursue lost truth. Crudely put, the cows are the truth: The men are the seekers.
In a series of tableaulike sections that follow one another like unfinished sentences continuing on the next page, the men, swathed in white and bathed in sculpted light, find footprints and follow them. They find the cows and struggle with them. They finally take the cows home. Then they sit in their garden and fall asleep, as if to say, "After all of this, what's the purpose?" Eventually a large circle is projected on the white muslin backdrop signifying the nothingness that comes after a mission is accomplished.
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The "Hot Key" of the title is a metaphor: There are several keys to happiness, but one of them may be hot (in the sense of being right).
On this philosophical metaphor, Man constructs yet another web of metaphor spun from sound, sight and movement. In one tableau, the men bring on life-size papier-mache cows. Yet the cows are precariously balanced on small hooves suggesting that truth itself is precarious. The men guide the cows, gliding them back and forth across the stage to give the bovines a weightless yet massive presence. Stretches of silence are punctuated with adrenaline-pumping crashes. The result is aurally terrifying, visually arresting and kinesthetically discombobulating. The effect is like peeping through a keyhole into Man's contemporary Japanese subconscious.
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