Sankai Juku founder and artistic director Ushio Amagatsu is one of the most elegant and sublime practitioners of the singular art of Butoh dance theater which arose in post-World War II Japan. Mr. Amagatsu has taken it far beyond its roots as an avant-garde art form that turned away from imitating Western dance as well as traditional Japanese dance, celebrating the crude physical gestures and outre habits of common citizens. In the nineteen eighties Butoh was revived and became more refined, incorporating the elements on full display in Amagatsu’s work “Meguri: Teeming Sea, Tranquil Land,” such as shaved heads, full body paint and stylized, surreal and slow, precisely deliberate movements, silent fully open-mouth screams with thrown back heads, and claw-like hands. The set for “Meguri” is a huge wall of bas-relief panels depicting sea lily fossils and what at first appears to be a large pool of water, all of which filled the width of the Granada Stage for its North American premiere, presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures. Ninety minutes of hypnotic and riveting “dance” movement and music, punctuated with bursts of more kinetic intervals, this strange and wonderful piece held the audience spellbound.
