Choreography by Natsu Nakajima
Fujiwara Dance
at the CanAsian International Dance Festival
Enwave Theatre
May 1 and May 3, 2008

   First presented at the National Arts Centre, Ottawa, in 1994, and subsequently performed internationally, Sumida River was given its final performances in Toronto, and anyone fortunate enough to have seen it would carry memories of a great dance artist in a stunningly choreographed work of Butoh. Natsu Nakajima’s hour-long piece is based on a 14^th century Noh drama about a woman who wanders the countryside in search of her 12-year old son who was kidnapped by thieves trading in children. She crosses the Sumida River only to discover that her son had died on the riverbank the previous year. As she prays beside his grave, she sees a vision of him, but the ghost disappears before she can actually touch it. She descends into madness, exacerbated by her grief. This background is helpful because the dance itself abstracts the tragedy from the tale by way of image, metaphor, and the inner life of the woman, incorporating these elements within the aesthetic of Butoh—an aesthetic that underscores the transformative power of dance without separating body from spirit. The Butoh body is a body that fully becomes itself through the effluences of spirit. Strangely and paradoxically, the psychic numbing of the body (as it is pushed to the extreme suffering) results in a more human quality.

   Danced on a bare, black floor with cunning lighting (by Roelof Peter Snippe), moving from darkness to semi-light and darkness again, a carefully patterned soundtrack (courtesy of composers Soga Masaru, Junko Handa, Makoto Sato, and Jean Michel Jarre), and with the barest of props (by Cheryl Lalonde), the piece is extraordinarily spare, taut, chilling, and moving. Denise Fujiwara is to Butoh in Canada what Peggy Baker is to modern dance. She reinvigorates the duality of dance (body/spirit) and she puts her own stamp on it. In Sumida River, she begins as a lump of dead flesh, heavily wrapped in a formless cloth cover. As birds call and an animal groan is heard in the distance, the lump moves ever so slightly, creeping into a manifestation of living flesh, though the woman herself remains invisible under the moving fabric. Only very gradually, does she reveal her chalk-white face (made up like a Noh mask), and even at that, it is mostly hidden under a broad-brimmed black conical hat. Her long, heavy, yellow robe seems to weigh her down physically, but it is her spirit that is heavier, sunk into a grief that defies words. Without narration, she is able to show us the source of that grief. She has lost a child. She slowly removes her hat and leads it the way a mother would a child. Her mouth opens in silent cries. Miraculously, the space around her has contracted as her spirit has expanded in this mourning.

   Unfolding in four sections, the dance carries us into the soul of tragedy through mime and movement that distills emotion to its essence. Four long, dry reeds become the dancer’s main prop for most of the tale, representing her goad, her instrument of self-punishment, the skeleton of a refuge, oars for an imaginary boat, her way of describing beautiful or wild semaphores for her pain. She treads in woe and barren yearning. Living voices in the distance—children at play, a dog yowling at the night, chiming bells—mock the death inside her heart. In one stunning sequence of mime, she pulls out her heart and her entrails, making of the latter a rope with which to pull her invisible child back to her. This is when her open mouth becomes a womb, crying out for what has been taken away forever from it. She would, if she could, pull her child back within her again, and feed it—as she indicates—urging it to eat what now only the empty air does. She searches again, blinded by the empty space around her. Every voice, every relic of sound becomes an unbearable affliction. When she imagines the ghost of her child, she makes to pull it down like a kite. Finally plumed like a rare lady, she is no less a victim. She quivers and shrinks like a dying bird, but revives and pulls a boat of cloth and wooden sticks in which nobody sits, moving slowly off into the final darkness along the river.

   I have turned Ms. Fujiwara’s astounding mime and movement into a narrative, but only to indicate how eloquent the dancer is with every pore of her being. This is a performance that truly defies description and one that expands with every further meditation. Its ambiguities are richly intriguing; its clarities essentially humanizing. Denise Fujiwara reveals the power, depth, and richness of dance, even when its codes are superficially foreign.  

photo 1: Cylla von Tiedemann

photo 2: Sandra Zea:


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