A COUPLE MAKES SOLOS.

A COUPLE MAKES SOLOS
LAZ BREZER
KEI TAKEI
LA MAMA, E.T.C.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
JUNE 15-18 AND 22-25, 2000

They're the odd couple. Kei Takei is a diminutive Japanese woman, who in the 1970s created a numberless series of elaborate rituals, each called Light, using numerous performers and natural objects: stones, rope, canvas, etc. Her husband, Laz Brezer, is a tall, ruggedly muscular transplanted Canadian who, in 1981, became associate artistic director of Takei's company, Moving Earth, also acting as translator of her heavily Japanese-accented English.

If their physiognomies prove that opposites attract, their successive weekend concerts corroborated the axiom. His, titled "Four Paths" from "100 Ways," comprised four pieces plus video interludes and lasted two hours. Hers, "The Absence of Izanagi," took forty minutes, total; it was an intense portrait of a woman searching for something missing from her life, drawn with tight, vibratory motion.

Brezer enlisted the assistance of several onstage mover/prop manipulators for My Friend--the most ambitious work--dedicated to the late scenic designer Tetsu Maeda. Floor-to-ceiling silken banners framed the stage, and huge, blurred video images played across the dancers' bodies. Brezer, in a white suit, vigorously gesticulated, center stage, while his attendants whirled around him. The piece unfolded at the distended pace of butoh, but it lacked the cohesiveness and focus to move us.

On the other hand, the apparently ageless Takei, who can turn her elfin body light as feathers or weight it with ponderous immensity, describes her pieces as "the diary of a woman who lives with uneasiness and sorrows caused by the absence of what she desires." The audience sat along two adjacent sides of her small stage, giving us an oblique view of her journey from darkness at the rear into Ranko Ohnishi's dramatic, pinpoint spotlighting.

Furiously pumping her arms like a sprinter to Somei Satoh's spare sounds of bells and gongs, Takei wheezed rhythmically with the effort of her arduous journey, her crushing psychic load. She inched between the gateway of two freestanding posts, slapping her body all over. She crouched on her hands, legs skittering behind her. A white circle painted on the floor surrounded her space--a noose, a cul-de-sac. (Architect Akio Hayashi designed the environment.) When finally she stepped across the white line, she was free, her travail lifted. She scampered around the circle, giddily erasing it with the soles of her feet. Her work, as spare as Brezer's was overstated, was a testament to the eloquence of artistic economy.