The Tokyo-born company Sankai Juku gave the U.S. premiere of its mesmerizing work Meguri: Teeming Sea, Tranquil Land at the Granada Theatre, opening UCSB Arts & Lectures’ 2019-20 season of dance.
Founded in 1975, Sankai Juku is a second-generation Butoh ensemble, purveyors of a difficult-to-define style of dance theater spawned in post WWII Japan’s avant garde. Founder Ushio Amagatsu said the term “meguri” indicates circulating water or anything that rotates, and connotes anything cyclical in nature like the passing of time, the seasons, or earth’s transitions.
On the stage, Meguri is eight male dancers with shaved heads, covered entirely in white paint wearing various versions of drapey white skirts.
To understated string music, the dancers embodied by turns flowy life under the sea and angular, complex movement that called to mind the ambivalence, ambition, curiosity, despair, and striving of human reality.
Before that, the house lights remained on, with dancers on the stage, while the audience coughed, fidgeted, crinkled wrappers and whispered for quite some time. Eventually the house lights dimmed and the stage lights came up.
A solitary dancer made almost imperceptible progress from stage right to left, with nuanced and curving hand, arm and spinal motions. Overhead lighting outlined the sinewy musculature and visible bone structure of a mature dancer.
As he reached the other side of the stage and exited, the audience sat silent, suspended in wonder and amazement. Dance audiences don’t usually hold their applause between movements like symphony patrons do, so the fact that we were all silent after every segment gives you a clue to how transfixed we were.
Then, four dancers, who had been on their backs on the floor, heads together with arms and feet in upside-down “all fours” moved as a single organism, mimicking a waving sea anemone. Individual fingers wiggled in the center like seeking filaments, and hands, arms and legs waved with the currents, opening and closing, flowing and drifting.
The four dancers moved in unison, in pairs, in sequence, to string music, sometimes a single pulsing unit, sometimes individuated, all spinning upright, with concave torsos and arms wide and curved downward.
It was breathtaking, mind-blowing.
After that, three figures appeared around a rectangular “pool” lit in deep blue on the floor, kneeling at the water’s edge.
The movement here was distinctly different — angular, upright, rushing, with sudden shifts. Each dancer took a turn in the center of the stage, shuffling audibly in a layer of sand, spinning and kicking up small dust clouds.
Viewed through a western filter (Sankai Juku has been commissioned by and worked from Théâtre de la Ville in Paris for 35 years), the movements echoed accusatory pointed fingers, hip hop floor spins, ballet port de bras, sports, worship, escape.
Four dancers in shorter skirts lined with red, apparently still above sea level, backed toward the center of the stage, exhibiting vigilance and trepidation, collapsing to fetal position, and rising as eight legs of a single organism, limbs quaking and trembling, taking excruciating wobbly first steps diagonally across the stage.
Next a trio of dancers moved to sounds of clinking chains, blustery wind, whips, and scraping rocks.
Pointing, grasping, striking, and then holding their hands over their own faces in what looked like horror at one’s own actions, their wide-open mouths expressed emotions from rage to despair with subtle changes in the curves of the lips.
The evening closed with the 16-tentacled anemone revived and the three figures bordering the water’s edge, closing a circle back to earlier contrasts and integrating life on land and under sea.
Watch for Arts & Lectures’ upcoming installments in this season’s diverse and compelling dance series: Dance Theatre of Harlem, Martha Graham Dance Theater, Grupo Corpo, Lyon Opera Ballet, and Ephrat Asherie Dance.
Local art critic Judith Smith-Meyer is a 24/7 appreciator of the creative act.