More Like a California Roll

When Japan meets America, cultural dissonance is welcome—as part of the conceptual glue

By Pamela Renner

There are many different ways to cross the threshold of a dance-theatre work like Big Dance Theater's The Other Here. In the piece, which premiered at the Japan Society in New York City this past February, the cast and creators braid together a skein of influences—Western and Eastern, American and Japanese, commercial, terpsichorean and literary. In part, the work deals with dreaming about another culture—while people from that world are simultaneously dreaming of you. But—sorry, Edward Said—it's not what you'd call Orientalism. Nor is it Occidentalism. It's more like a conversation between friendly antitheses.

A choreographic hybrid, The Other Here draws from the stately Okinawan dance tradition, whose roots go back three or four hundred years, and from the pulsing, up-to-the-minute pop music that bubbles out from the same volcanic island chain today. The piece also spins off into a hypnotic impression of American life-insurance salesmen. Its script generously samples the actual speeches and audience questions from the annual meeting of an association called the Million Dollar Roundtable. A barefoot, androgynous narrator in a business suit (Jess Barbagallo) delivers the pitches of the sales gurus in a rapid-fire patter. Signing on the dotted line means entering into a "contract of love."

It's the hurtling velocity of the piece that first strikes an observer. It pulses along between bits of Chaplinesque physical comedy and eggbeater-quickened Japanese dance, suddenly opening out into a rehearsal of emergency evacuation procedures, or a smoky 1930s cabaret number, sung in Okinawan dialect by a blonde American chanteuse with cherry blossoms in her hair—her every note freighted with far-away longing.

Then there's the recurring video image (designed by Peter Flaherty) of the carp, swimming through the scenes on a bright, portable plasma screen—and growing larger in each new incarnation. By the final scenes, the fish has morphed into an enormous floor-to-ceiling projection across the slats of a bamboo screen—white fins flaring.

The Japan Society's performing arts director Yoko Shioya commissioned The Other Here to celebrate the society's 100th-anniversary season. Selections from the piece previewed at the University of Maryland's Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center in fall 2006, and were showcased Jan. 21-22 at the Works & Process series at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. It runs May 2-3 at the University of Houston. Then, July 12-15, the piece travels to Jacob's Pillow in Massachusetts. In September, it returns to New York for 10 days at Dance Theater Workshop.

Annie-B Parson, the work's choreographer, first bumped into Okinawan dance from many latitudes away. She was combing through dance tapes in the New York Library for the Performing Arts when she encountered this colorful tradition. "I liked the way they'd lined up the eyes, the shoulders and the pelvis," she says. The dancers' posture seemed "homey," to her, though it spoke of a homeland she didn't yet know much about. What Parson was intuitively responding to were courtly and popular traditions dating back to the 16th and 17th centuries, in which crouching classical dancers would spin out quick fan-flares. With one peacock-bright fan clasped in each hand and stomping leg lifts, they looked almost like sailing vessels churning up the seas between their native islands and their various destinations: the Japanese mainland, ports in Southern Asia and China.

Spiritually speaking, the aquamarine seas connected the robust island people of Okinawa with a realm of the gods, thought to hover in the air above the waters. As Okinawan dance scholar Ritsuko Sakiyama writes, "The spirit of prayer is expressed in stylized gesture, while prayer itself becomes manifest in song, thereby opening the way to development of the performing arts."

Figuratively though, Okinawan dance formed a bridge between the island kingdom, Ryukyu, and its old colonial masters: The people of Okinawa paid tribute to their Chinese colonists, but they also prospered themselves. Trade brought wealth to the sun-drenched chain of islands.

Such cross-cultural alliances meant that dance, song and other entertainments would be required to delight distinguished foreign visitors to the court. Globalization—at least of an early, South Asian variety—played a central role in the cultural evolution of the Okinawan islands.

None of this history is explicitly present in The Other Here. Yet it settles over the moving limbs of the dancers, who are garbed in an attractive hodge-podge of silk brocades, Japanese kimonos, obi sashes and hobo tweeds; it's a kind of subliminal force. Parson explains: "During the rehearsal process, we create a fruitful chaos that comes to order." The members of Big Dance Theater share a long-standing interest in Japanese dance, and one of its dancers, Molly Hickok, learned about traditional dance in Kyoto and continues to study it in New York, under master teacher Sachiyo Ito. Hickok says, "It's not about self-expression—it's about embodying a form. If you do that over time, maybe an expression will happen."

Much of the script for The Other Here is unapologetically Western and postmodern in sensibility. Co-director Paul Lazar (who performs the role of Medhi, another insurance salesman) explains that a central part of the group's creative process is to yoke disparate forms together—and then see what resonates.

Inevitably, one returns to the plangency of that carp, an image with a distinctive literary origin. It appears first in an early story by Japanese writer Masuji Ibuse: one of two short fictions from a mostly 1920-'30s collection called Salamander that's integral to the script of The Other Here. Lazar, Parson and Hickok (the piece's dramaturg, dance researcher and performer) share an abundant enthusiasm for Ibuse's stories. They hear echoes of Chekhov's artistry in the tales. They've discovered that the Russian writer was an important influence upon Ibuse, who's best known for his late novel Black Rain (inspired by the diaries of Hiroshima survivors). In fact, Lazar and Parson made a literary pilgrimage to visit Ibuse's house, about an hour's drive outside of Fukuyama. Though the writer died in the 1990s, his elderly nephew continues to live in his house. And, yes, there's still a white carp swimming in Ibuse's pond.

Lazar recalls how he and Parson spent a day at home with the late writer's nephew. Now a man of almost 80, he's made a career teaching literature. During Ibuse's lifetime, the two were kindred spirits. They spent many hours together, and shared a penchant for literary conversation. Lazar says, "The nephew lovingly complained that his uncle would want him to sit up all night drinking, and he had to get up and teach in the morning. Ibuse often talked to him about Chekhov, this great writer." Ibuse's story "The Carp" is refracted—kaleidoscope style—in the dance-theatre piece. In it, a dying man gives this fish to his surviving friend as a sentimental token that also carries a deep responsibility. After his friend's death, the recipient tries to pass the carp on to a university pond or, eventually, back to the young man's widow. The gesture is not without an accompanying sense of regret and loss.

Lazar explains, "You're aware when you read the Ibuse that when the protagonist sees the carp through a university fence, surrounded by students, it's a somebody in this distinct state of isolation looking somewhat longingly at a society, a culture, a group that has its own language and upbeat jargon; it's got a solidity, a fluidity. We could sketch it with authority. Because we're doing two stories and adding a whole other culture, the American, you're seeing it through a fragmented prism."

Big Dance Theater's actual visit to Okinawa to meet with experts in musical and dance traditions came late in their creative journey—a visit which added texture to the performance. Magpie-like, they dropped bits of Okinawan pop music into their soundscape, along with 1920s café ballads. Their cast—mostly young and American—doesn't necessarily understand the Japanese lyrics of their songs. Heather Christian, who sings with delicate melancholy, learned all her lyrics phonetically. The emotional intelligence of the songs (some in Okinawan dialect) comes through plainly.

The sense of earthiness in the Okinawan materials was a kind of counterpoint to the extreme restraint of Ibuse's fiction. Though both were ostensibly "Japanese," the materials were actually quite far-flung—Parson compares it to setting one of Eugene O'Neill's plays to a soundtrack of Hawaiian tunes. In addition, these materials are spliced with the turbo-charged voices of America's top insurance sales force—speeches taken from actual videos and inspirational books that Hickok found in a used bookstore uptown. The composite creates a whirlwind of contrasts. In Shioya's eyes, the Big Dance Theater approach is more like a California roll, offering texture, color and surprise—all in a delicious package. Lazar explains: "Whatever we make, we're in the habit of sifting it through our sensibility. We don't want to pretend we're not who we are."

Parson says: "One thing we had a lot of fun with in this piece is contrasting all that speed and colliding of worlds and centuries with just silence."

Arts journalist Pamela Renner is a frequent contributor to this magazine.