Dance Review - Curious Fish - Pamela Herron, Vangeline and Katsura Kan Dance, Inside and Outside the Theater - Review


Julieta Cervantes

From left, Lena Ang, Krista DeNio, Melissa Lohman and Fulya Peker in “Curious Fish” at Chashama on Sunday.

Sometimes Butoh, the outre, avant-garde dance movement that developed in mid-20th-century Japan, seems tailor made for New York.

On Sunday night Pamela Herron of Vangeline Theater gave a free dance performance outside Chashama, at 217 East 42nd Street in Manhattan, before the Katsura Kan show “Curious Fish,” presented by Chashama and Vangeline. Barefoot and wearing black tulle, a pleatherlike tank and long gloves, with a ruff of black fabric pulled over her eyes like something out of a Rebecca Horn film, Ms. Herron undulated and grimaced, moving between ecstasy and the grotesque.

And the good people of New York? For the most part they walked right by. You’ve got to love this city.

Inside, her face whitened and wearing what might have been a deconstructed wedding dress, Vangeline herself performed her brief solo “Unspoken.” Her body clenched and her facial muscles fluttering, she turned slowly, arching back as if to receive something. Though she flirted with unintentional comedy, Vangeline was captivating in her devotion to simple movements.

But the main attraction underlined that all is not right with the Butoh-New York exchange. Mr. Kan is one of several master Butoh practitioners whose collaborations with non-Japanese performers have been seen here of late. These masters talk of Americans needing to find their own Butoh, but the results tend to be watered-down, uncomfortably imitative versions of the real thing.

Many of the stylistic cliches surfaced in “Curious Fish”: near-naked, whitened dancers; rose petals; creaturely transformations; and a predilection for camp and the absurd. Certainly there were absorbing moments. Who wouldn’t take at least a passing interest in bare-chested, powdered ladies with daisies in their upswept hair, pretending to be chickens, and angry chickens at that?

But the formula is so tired that even the inevitable star-turn finale by Mr. Kan fell flat. He is riveting in his muscular control and mental concentration. But hard as this may be to believe, if you’ve seen one near-hairless, whitened, tortured man in a loin cloth, you’ve seen them all. Nothing outre lasts forever, and it may just be that Butoh has had its day.

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