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Slowly, gingerly, the dancer and choreographer Koma Otake shuffles onto a gleaming white stage scattered with potatoes. Carrying brown boots with out laces and draped in material, he makes his manner throughout the house when a cumbersome mound of fabric slips down his again. With a stressed squirm, he shakes it till potatoes rain onto the ground like hail, including extra objects to the theatrical canvas. He rips the burlap sack off his again and whips it into the air, sending it offstage with a flourish.
Like practically each second in Otake’s triptych, “You,” carried out at Danspace Undertaking, in Manhattan, on Thursday, this stream of motion looks like a slow-motion dream by which anguish and grief ripple throughout the stage like wounds incapable of closing. (By the top, Otake’s scratched up legs are literally bleeding.) All of the whereas, he trudges alongside, edging his manner round his efficiency house: dodging potatoes; ripping by way of his paper set of 4 shoji screens; and, over the course of the evening-length work, performing a striptease. By the ultimate scene, he’s bare. Disrobing is his method to relax, he writes in his choreographer’s notes, a few of that are learn in a gap voice-over.
The Japanese-born Otake, who’s in his mid-70s, started engaged on his personal in 2016 after a long time creating efficiency works along with his spouse because the duo Eiko and Koma. (Then he was identified merely as Koma.) Like “The Ghost Competition,” his first multidisciplinary solo, “You” — unhappy, unusual, evocative — is a component efficiency and half set up. A portray by Otake hangs in entrance of the screens; it appears to be like to be an individual holding an injured animal. However blink, stare at it once more, and it turns into one thing else.
Within the opening part, Otake picks up a potato and hurls it towards his portray, later stabbing the display it hangs on with an arrow. Potatoes, we study from Otake’s notes, are bombs. “They’re additionally the lifeless individuals on the bottom.”
Amy Winehouse’s “Again to Black” performs, after which he shouts unintelligible phrases, as if he had been speaking to ghosts. Is his physique doing the haunting or is it haunted? His progress is marked by a spiraling backbone and peculiar, rigorously articulated steps, by which he lingers on outer edges of his toes, typically lifting and stretching his toes aside like tentacles. The eerie expression on his good-looking face veers from horror to vacant to nearly amused. This isn’t a cheerful dance because the voice-over warned us from the beginning: “‘You’ is a dance of ‘I’ve nothing.’”
However there are touches of absurdity. Because it progresses, “You” slips deeper and deeper into the psyche of a person who, maybe, is trying again at his life. A tragicomedy sensibility takes over, which is in some way rooted in Otake’s fearlessness: He holds nothing again as he dances with quite a lot of objects or invisible individuals; to him, they signify the collective “you,” which, he writes, are “a pal, a dad or mum, a brother, a road and a factor.”
Having slipped out of his footwear within the first part, he pulls down his kimono so that he’s bare-chested within the second part whereas cradling then destroying a chair, beginning with a punch by way of its paper seat after which tearing at its splintery legs. He dons a pink chili pepper necklace (his notes clarify that peppers shield a home from evil) and drifts throughout the stage to tango music whereas dabbing his face with a sponge coated in white paint.
Pulling again a nook of the work’s Marley dance flooring, Otake is on a mission: to interrupt down his set. On the similar time, he turns into more and more raveled. He rips up a shoji display by stumbling by way of it; he unfastens his portray, which falls to the ground. It’s like a twister has blown by way of the house.
Within the remaining part, Otake stands along with his again to the viewers and intentionally slides out of his kimono till he’s bare. To tango music, he leans over a window ripped out of the display and pushes over it, in order that his rear and legs cling over the sting. OK, now that is humorous. And diabolical. However quickly, the temper shifts and simply as his set has fallen aside, so does Otake. Dabbing his physique with extra white paint, he scoots nearer and nearer to his portray till he’s curled up beside it. As Winehouse’s lyrics hinted earlier within the evening, that is Otake’s resting place: “And I’m going again to black.”
Koma Otake: “You”
By means of Dec. 16 at Danspace Undertaking Manhattan; danspaceproject.org.
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