active fruits
by
Douglas Messerli
Tabaimo
and Maki Morishita (director and choreographer) Fruits Borne Out of Rust /
REDCAT (the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) / the performance I saw was
with Lita Barrie on Sunday, February 23, 2020
I
never, as a critic, enjoy complaining about the difficulties one has in
describing the event he has just encountered. I’ve done it only a very few
times. But the rather stunningly beautiful Tabaimo and Maki Morishita performance
of their Fruits Borne Out of Rust is just such a work. I think part of
the problem exists within me, enjoying the sensibility of Japanese culture without
entirely being able to completely comprehend it.
Having just come back from the completely energetic
dance performances of Lula Washington and the Contra-Tiempo Urban Latin Dance
Theater performances at the Wallis Annenberg theater in Beverly Hills, I was a
bit underwhelmed by this quieter and more intellectually conceived work.
Both
of those previous concerts were so exciting to the audience and performers that
you had to just wonder at their exuberance. Combining, Latin American, African,
and black American cultural references made me realize just how much of US
dance depends on these sources. After all, jazz and Latin American rhythms are
at the heart of what is perhaps one of our very greatest of contributions of
the popular theater musicals, Leonard Bernstein’s and Jerome Robbins’ West Side
Story.
Just yesterday, in The New York Times Gia
Kourlas rightfully called out the abandonment by the rather dour Belgian
director Ivo van Hove’s version of the new Broadway representation of the great
musical made even greater through its cinematic presentation. The finger-clips,
she argued, represented the very visceral and bodily tension of the young
people of that period, a kind of beat-like energy that went right down their
torsos into their legs. As Kourlas quite brilliantly argues:
Robbins’s choreography — with its searing
blend of tension and
freedom — gives “West Side Story” its joy
and its horror. It
springs the events into action. Arthur
Laurents wrote the book, but
Robbins’s choreography is the true
libretto.
Let’s
just say that US citizens, like as the name of one of the characters in West
Side Story, like “action.”
Compare that with director Tabaimo’s note
about the work I saw the other night:
Rust is the reaction of iron undergoing
oxidation in effort to obtain a more
stable state of matter.
From
instability, stability is born. Then, when that stability loses its balance,
an unstable state is born again….
Though it may look as though the cycle
is going around and around, it is
actually progressing little by little
until the fruits of this cycle are born.
Those fruits will not be still, but
rather will create another phase of instability.
And
indeed, this performance by the excellent dancer Chiharu Mamiya, a classically trained
ballet dancer, does gradually represent just those cycles and transformations
that Tabaimo and Morishita proclaim.
Brief—in my mind all too brief—exultations
of exciting dance movement alternate in this work with slow-moving, on-the-floor
arm and leg gesticulations. These seem more like something, to me, out of
Kabuki theater than traditional Western dance. I realize my lack of perception,
and my own inability to recognize the theoretical possibilities of dance—which
I also truly admire—yet by the performance’s ending I felt disappointed,
particularly after the wonderful final Medea-like let-go of Mamiya at the end. Somehow
I felt frustrated to not experience Mamiya’s balletic abilities.
Yet, she was able to convey a great many emotional
expressions even laying on the floor, particularly when alternating in a
colorful leotard with more active expressions of her skills. But the true genius
of this work exist in Tabaimo’s startlingly beautiful video
projections—reminding me somewhat of the Barrie Kosky videos for Mozart’s The
Magic Flute.
In the end, I came to appreciate this work
because it was based on a theory inside the body’s simple ability to explode in
its need to express possible motion. Perhaps the citizens of the US need to
curtail their more violent expressions and maybe the Japanese need to let
themselves—and I say this after reviewing dozens of Japanese films by Kurosawa,
Oshima, Teshigahara and numerous others—desire to open themselves up to a livelier
expression of love and desire. Rust and oxidation just doesn’t do it for me.
As my theater companion for the night,
Lita Barrie, and I rose to leave the REDCAT Theater, she asked me what I
thought about the performance. I didn’t immediately answer since I do not like
to have other theater-goers overhear my appreciations and peeves. Each to their
own views I would intensely argue. But as we left the theater for the parking
lot, I suggested that I found the dance quite “gestural.”
She laughed: “That’s just what the man
next to me whispered as we were about to leave.”
But “gestural” is not necessarily a
negative statement. It’s simply a different tradition from ours, one that I
might want to explore more deeply. If the highly expressive Method Acting and melodramatic
dramas of US theater define us, perhaps just a gentle movement of the hands,
the face, the legs, might be a better way to express our pain and frustrations.
Perhaps the cycle of rust to oxidation represents a far longer view of human
life. And perhaps the slow movement from one to the other is not so very
different from what occurred in West Side Story: the past to the
present, when the oxygen of the one redacts the other. The newly acclimated
Sharks, after all, destroyed the Jets.
Los
Angeles, February 26, 2020
Reprinted
from USTheater, Opera, and Peformance (February 2020).
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