Dairakudakan’s cyber spectacle thrills
Janet Smith DANCE
d JAPAN’S DAIRAKUDAKAN ENDED its delirious spectacle at the Vancouver International Dance Festival with a long, ungodly moan. The fitting, Frankensteinlike howl no doubt echoed in the ears of the stunned crowd members as they ventured out into the cold night.
On its third trip here, Akaji Maro’s troupe did not disappoint, conjuring a nonstop, ghoulish parade of monsters and mayhem.
With Pseudo human/super human, Maro created a sinister, and often blackly funny, cyborg hell—one populated with pale, dead-eyed automatons with sparkling metal skulls, beings who flailed long machine arms, and even a thudding beast straight out of Mary Shelley’s imagination.
Maro was making a clever connection between the reanimated corpse in Shelley’s novel and our obsession with technology and artificial intelligence. And let’s just say he doesn’t think any of this so-called progress will turn out well for humankind.
The visual feast contrasted starkly with the last production Dairakudakan brought to VIDF. Whereas Paradise was a carnival of flowers and satin-clad roller skaters, Pseudo human built a cold, mechanical universe. The most striking feature was the central illuminated glass-and-metal structure by the Japanese artist known as KUMA (Katsuyuki Shinohara). The red- or blue-glowing post splayed, treelike, at the top into a cerebral tangle that hung over the action like its sci-fi brain centre. At the back of the stage, automatons writhed and pounded their hands on glass lab cases.
The evening served up its ideas in a series of dream-logic vignettes, each more bizarre than the last. Just a few of the eye-popping highlights: four men dancing with and splaying the legs of life-size puppets; a small army of bald machine minions dragging in Frankenstein’s monster, complete with exposed rib cage and platform shoes, by chains; the robo-armed character getting her mechanical limbs ripped off, revealing red, veinlike ribbons; and a Dr. Frankenstein character trying to animate a suspended Maro– look-alike puppet by dousing it in fluorescent-pink goo.
The images were outlandish, but the butoh-style dancing was never less than topnotch, the dancers articulating every last gnarled finger, contorted spine, and silent scream.
The pinnacle of the night, as always with Dairakudakan, was the final act, when Maro himself—in a Bride of Frankenstein white gown, a wild fright wig to match, and eerie Noh makeup—made his grand entrance aboard a cyberslave-drawn wagon. He may have been wearing a death stare, but you knew he was laughing at the universe, and the follies of its silly, self-destructing humans.
As you can probably guess, Dairakudakan is not a regular night out at the theatre; for most of us, that’s the draw, but to be sure, the warped hallucinations left a few in the audience puzzled. The rest jumped to their feet at the end in frenzied applause. Maro, and the festival that brings him and his big company to Vancouver, have built a devoted following here, and he rewarded his fans’ expectations amply. g
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Ken Eisner
A documentary by Liz Marshall. Rating unavailable
AS BUCKMINSTER FULLER stated with unsettling clarity way back in 1969, modern humanity faces a stark choice between utopia and oblivion. Consciously or not, Fuller’s challenge was picked up by the children of the ’60s, with alternative communities of greater or lesser virtue popping up all over a so-called developed world, founded generally on principles of collectivism, egalitarianism, and deep reverence for Spaceship Earth.
Midian Farm was one such experiment, arriving in Beaverton, Ontario, in 1971, thanks to Grainger Cowie and Diane Marshall, two welltravelled Christians who’d already gathered a small flock while running a drop-in centre for youths in hippie
Birds of Passage.
closing scenes leaves an ambivalent question mark. If we’re closer to oblivion than ever before, Midian Farm reminds us that the road to utopia still means grappling with the alien technology of being human.
Adrian Mack