Buto Sha Tenkei.

There were times during the performance of Buto-sha Tenkei's Nocturne that I definitely felt out of the loop. Around me were quiet chuckles, and I didn't see anything funny in what was happening onstage. What was I missing? Was not being Japanese my problem?

The program was not helpful. "Nocturne ... is based on the theme of night.... Borrowing the narrative style of a dream, the work unfolds as though beat were applied to invisible ink; the strange radiance of life emerging from the depths of sleep becomes slowly visible."

To be sure, there was the usual stock of butoh devices -- chalky makeup, dramatic lighting, arrested motion, distorted, sexless figures, weird sounds. But there were also plenty of oddities -- a skittering angel who might have escaped from Balanchine's Nutcracker; a dynamic, mambo-dancing Kewpie doll wearing a shift with the rising sun; a bodysuited dream girl; a pair of mad, aerobic Pierrots; music by Chopin; a bang-up tango finale.

What was it all about? Who were these figures? What did they have to do with one other? What was all this Western stuff doing in an echt-Eastern theater form? Could Nocturne be a joke? A postmodernist send-up of butoh's high seriousness? Or simply a piece with a quirky sense of humor that failed to jell?

The young woman who played the Kewpie doll and one of the Pierrots was terrific, cross-cultural wonders, Asian and Western at the same time. Accomplished but not quite spellbinding were the dancers who performed the roles of traditional characters -- the old woman sunk under the crippling carapace of a kimono, the diapered man imprisoned in a column of near blinding light remembering some unspeakable horror. Although technically sophisticated, the transformations, like the characters, were essentially cliches.

I came away from this eighty-minute work wondering at the discrepancy between what choreographer Ebisu Torii intended and what he produced. if Nocturne was about the radiance of life becoming slowly visible, I didn't get it. Nor, judging from their response, did the chucklers around me, who weren't even American. For all the talk about the global village, it's amazing what still gets lost in translation.