Wreck Beach Butoh 2005

I have now seen the Wreck Beach Butoh performance on three summers 2002, 2003 and 2005. The last summer of 2005 I attended both Saturday and Sunday shows which took place in excellent weather in full sun on a weekend in late August - the tenth time that Kokoro Dance produced this amazing summer spectacle. A bit of grandiosity in my narrative may be excused by my specially dedicated spectatorship - being there already 3 times in 4 years, crawling as close to the elements as the physical body permits. All signals are firing now for me be one of the dancers. Thus this is not a review - it's a memoir or a wish.

Twenty-two bodies clad in actor's marble-white paint step out into the plains of the beach at low-tide. Shining in the sun, they form a large circle and begin warm-up exercises. Pink-bodied nudists and beachgoers in colored garments keep their distance from the sacred space where the grounds for the dance ritual are being prepared - the dancers' ring crowns the sea. The warm-up allows one to examine the variety of bodies - it is not the male-female difference that is striking - it is the small differences in depth of execution of various yoga-like poses and moves. Each dancer has his/her own approach to the needs of the body.

Wearing nature-provided costume I watched over the circle from a large rock observing the preparation ceremony and thought about the words of Baudelaire:

This poem was my guiding idea that indeed had brought me to that place and I felt elected to admire the efficiency of the indulgent sea shore. The majority of the dancers were female, justifying the reverences to Sappho, and showed a powerfully masculine spirit suggested by the poet. And each stanza repeats the first verse and echoes some in subsequent stanzas. The poem in all its 15 stanzas works just like the sea. It was so wonderfully satisfying to have the poetic inspiration born in the Mediterranean reflected all the way to the shores of the Pacific.

The dance begins in pairs - a still standing body paired with one lying as if dead on the wet sand. The standing and live ones start gradually shaking nearly to the point of losing control. This movement is imparted to the bodies lying on the sand which acquire life - but it is still the life of the dead. They stand up in a crooked manner and fall - but their necromant partner proudly walks the circle around the half-dead, half-raised body - like an eagle holding down its prey - arms outstretched above the head, glorified expression radiating from the face as well as from the entire body. The fallen suddenly master the technique of life and acquire a mechanical manner of movement. This makes them equal with their partners - the scene goes into the display of dramatically complex and monumental poses with one leg being raised above the head, while the necromant undergoes a transition to shrivelled down death-like posture The group then dissolves into movement of hopping from one foot to another with arms being tossed above the head from left to right and back. In this manner the group of dancers moves toward the water's edge where they tumble over and recollect themselves.

The recharging effect of reaching back to the powers of the sea is repeated several times during the dance. Reaching the water some dancers crash head first in the shallow waves, some lie down like logs with their legs and flanks forming parallel lines. Then they gradually emerge back - standing up slowly and forming a tightly closed block of bodies facing the shore and initiate a movement starting from the back rows. They uniformly swing once left elbow, once left ankle over to the opposite side of the body - all in unison - creating an amazing living machine effect. The living machine moves forward toward the beach, backs again into the water, preparing a surprise.

At some point the dancers suddenly run toward rocks on shore and find little funny straw hats of various sizes, all smaller than practical hats, put them on their heads and immediately start running on their fours toward the water. This made me think of little baby hatchling turtles racing to the water - a scene from natural science movies. Here with nude depersonalized dancers the hat and the thought of a turtle in a shell created an impression of acquiring a grotesque kind of personality. After the short-lived turtle run the hat-wearing dancers start behaving erratically, they mock the spectators, approaching some face to face and bursting in laughter. Oh, the infamy of personality! We emphasize the face only, normally by wearing clothes all over the body but here by just putting on funny hats. A hatted face creates a mockery of our human condition, like an overgrown body part housing our overvalued rationality, it tyrannizes the rest of the body that never speaks a word, never has a thought, but carries the heavy load of self-contradicted will and sensual physicality. The ensuing hat dance is the struggle of face and body that exhausts the physical, immobilizes the personal, creates heaps of bodies - four piles, stacked 6 or 7 high - filled with breathing chests and bellies.

As the heaps come apart the dancers sit in a few groups and calmly and slowly shed the hats. It is a somber moment, a death-like moment of saying good-bye to oneself, to the "I" that will not again be the same. The liberation from personality begins in sadness of a final parting and gradually proceeds towards the joy of the new and to the ecstasy of a mystical acceptance. Rising up each dancer's body finds its partner and lover and having formed couples they move to the discovery of the erotic body. They stand facing each other completely - with open chests, open arms and thighs, faces open but relatively diminished - each offers to the partner a full and immeasurable admiration. They gently touch each other - with open palms, feet, arms and legs they seek the radiancy of the other marble-like glistening surface feeding the lover with the beauty of the beloved. The relation is initially symmetric where each partner is both the lover and beloved but gradually one emerges as the lover at which point this becomes a sinuous struggle, a fight, chase and hunt, - although in place and without pursuit, with victim and hunter already embraced, with a single hunting horn, that of the sea, sounding a constant tone. Still one of the dancers of the couple gains the role of strength and becomes, so to speak, masculine - becomes "la mâle Sapho". The male lover now leads the other one - hardly perceptibly. This subtle role-based gender difference marked right now appears so much justified on top of the prior filling of both with the common fuel of erotic radiancy. The male forces the female to surrender in the exquisite maneouver in which he holds her neck from behind. The female lover then turns outwardly from him and presents her body like a bent bow of her arched back to the ultimate caress that comes from energies beyond the lovers' control. As that climax is invisibly delivered the female lover flails and weakens falling into the care of her partner. The dancer who became male carries his partner out of the space of the ecstasy on his back.

The couple of lovers with the exhausted female being carried gets lost among the crowd of spectators. They say "excuse me", "oh we are lost", they move awkwardly, in disarray - mystically enriched while homeless in the world. The spectators are unsure what to do and how they might be surprised again. The moment of getting lost accentuates the practical poverty and helplessness of those who chose and succumbed to beauty.

No longer surprisingly the lovers couples draw to the sea where they recollect themselves again in a block of bodies doing the machine movement - corresponding perhaps to an angelic choir - finally backing into the waves to take the final bow and accept applause.

Tomasz Gil © 2005