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By Lisa Jo Sagolla
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Published on January 29, 2025
I-Ling Liu's "…and, or…" Photo by Richard Termine
"Contemporary Dance Festival: Japan + East Asia" at Japan Society
Choreography: Ruri Mito, Daeho Lee, I-Ling Liu
Dancers: Ruri Mito, Daeho Lee, Junghwi Park, Jisoo Ryu, Taejun Yoon, Jyun-Yi Lin, Wei-Ting Hung, Lena Hashimoto, Fuko Ikegami, Sae Kodama, Risa Makino, Miyu Motegi, Miki Sasaki, Mariko Shibata, Maho Takahashi
Venue: Japan Society
Dates: January 10 - 11, 2025
Presenting performances entirely in person for the first time since 2019, 2025’s "Contemporary Dance Festival: Japan + East" Asia marks the 20th installment of the Japan Society’s prestigious contemporary dance showcase.
Curated since 2004 by the Society’s artistic director, Yoko Shioya, and performed at the organization’s landmark New York headquarters (designed by architect Junzo Yoshimura), the showcase began in 1997 as a platform to introduce Japanese dance companies and choreographers to New York audiences.
In 2008, it broadened to include artists from other East Asian countries, and this year presented two North American premieres — the striking duet …and, or…by Taiwanese choreographer I-Ling Liu, and Korean dancer-choreographer Daeho Lee’s overextended quartet Trivial Perfection — bookended by two intriguing New York premieres by Japanese choreographer Ruri Mito, her prize-winning self-performed solo, Matou, and a mesmerizing ensemble piece, Where we were born.
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Performed as a pre-show event in the lobby, the slow, shape-driven Matou proved riveting. Set to spare, barely audible music by Yuta Kumachi, it’s propelled by spurts of muscular tension that Mito employs to push and release her body into a stream of captivatingly contorted positions, interspersed with leisurely periods of breath-filled stillness that allow sufficient time for us to study each new ensnaring configuration. And it’s these jarringly unfamiliar configurations that make the piece so interesting.
Often bent backwards, her spine folded nearly in half, and her head turned sideward, Mito places her body parts in such unusual spatial relationships to one another that we are challenged to recognize a nose, from a knee joint, elbow, thigh bone, wrist, or rib. At one point it looks like she has feet growing upward out of her skull. Then suddenly she’s balancing tripod-like — on the top of her head, one knee, and a palm — with her chest pointed skyward. She travels circularly, with rich dimensionality, creating an absorbing sphere of shifting corporeal arrangements in which notions of forward, backward, and vertical alignment grow meaningless.
The show proper opened with Trivial Perfection, a long, meandering work performed by Lee and three other members of his South Korea-based male dance troupe, C.SENSE. The men are all strong, charismatic movers, and exude appealing individual personas as they horse around together, initially in silence, imitating one another’s simple gestures, body percussion rhythms, or athletic actions. It’s all about “hey, I want to do what he’s doing!” When one guy sits and mimes rowing, the others join in until they’re all gliding across the floor in perfect unison like an elite crew racing to the finish line. We grow to really like these guys and, hence, want to learn more about what makes them tick.
But sadly, Lee’s choreography is emotionally unrevealing and visually ho-hum — and seems to go on forever. Though the movements grow more intense — particularly when the harsh rock music of onstage composer/sound designer/guitarist Hyunsoo Kim starts to drive the proceedings – they don’t deepen or develop choreographically. As if made “crazy” by the pulsating sounds, individuals rise and vibrate ferociously — and that’s about as interesting as it gets.
Liu’s duet, on the other hand, is absolutely stunning. Not only is it crafted with ingenious unity, but it was amazingly performed by Taiwanese dancers Jyun-Yi Lin and Wei-Ting Hung. The work’s stylish movement phrases are built of quickly-changing, complexly-designed poses, each incorporating so many different kinds of lines, angles, levels, twists, and tensions that our eye is awash in visual excitement as we rush to understand all that we’re seeing before the “picture” switches. As the piece progresses, the phrases repeat, and we soon start to “learn” them. However, the energies, balance points, accents, and speed of the phrases alter, in canny expression of the joy, trickiness, and irritations of a couple testing the boundaries of a personal relationship.
Astoundingly, the work is danced in silence, and I was dumbfounded trying to figure out how Lin and Hung achieved such perfect coordination in their sudden, percussive pivots from one pose to another. The rest periods in between their movements were always of varying lengths — sometimes a second, sometimes ten, at other times non-existent as a sequence of poses would flash before your eyes like a video on fast-forward. Their bodies were typically so tightly-interwoven that a slight timing error could spell disaster. To me, their sensitivity to one another’s physical impulses was truly magical (or, okay, the result of countless rehearsal hours).
Closing the program, Mito’s Where we were born offered a gently evolving portrait of the human body as both a social and an individual force. Danced to an evocative soundscape of nature noises by Chie Nakajima, the beautifully constructed work begins with a clump of bodies morphing ever-so-slowly into pyramid shapes that breathe, stretch, and lift up a changing array of individual bodies. The pyramids start to stretch and flatten into weird, organic forms that grow thicker, then thinner, higher, then lower, as the mass of bodies seems to breathe and move as one gigantic creature. It’s quite fascinating to watch. And there’s two ways to do so. You can give yourself over to the “clump” and look at its motions holistically, as there’s no way to discern the origin or initiation point of any movement impulse — the ensemble work by the Japan-based Co.Ruri Mito is that good! Or you can try to focus on an individual performer and enjoy the unique positions they assume and how they attach themselves to the bodies around them — a hand lying atop another’s shoulder, a knee resting on a back, a torso draped over an arm.
An astute choreographer, Mito never lets things get monotonous, but rather takes us on an unhurried journey of tiny surprises. When for one brief instant we see everyone’s face looking out at us, we have no idea how that happened, as in the preceding moment we couldn’t even “find” most dancers’ heads amid the sculpted blob. Later, all the hands are released and float upward and outward, only to slowly descend and re-attach.
We grow scared for this mass of humanity when individuals start breaking away, making bold statements in animalistic squats. Eventually, the bodies re-coalesce into a new clump in a new part of the stage, their energies given over to the group, yet also disturbingly deadened. Ultimately, we’re left to seriously ponder the nature and purpose of our human bodies vis a vis those of everyone else.
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