Finding A Place In The World. (Reviews: National).

FINDING A PLACE IN THE WORLD ROSY CO YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA SEPTEMBER 6-9, 2001

Choreographer Kota Yamazaki and his Tokyo-based dance company, Rosy Co, made their Bay Area debut with a performance of Chinoise Flower. Like its polyglot title, the piece was a blend of cultural material culled from butoh, classical ballet, French and German dance theater, and American contemporary dance.

Yamazaki, who has worked with butoh innovator Akira Kasai, ballet choreographer Hirofumi Inoue, and French choreographer Daniel Larrieu, seems to exist in self-imposed exile in Western dance forms. Chinoise Flower has a youthful quality, professional and amateurish by turns, evoking the frontier spirit of modern dance.

Ryoji Ikeda's electronic score, with selections titled "Space," "C," and "Time," was two parts minimalist to one part collagist. The first two sections of the dance offered a tricolor scenic element (red, white, and black) for a two-tone dance: the slow and the maniacally fast. Shapes in the opening tableau changed slowly enough as to look like magic. As the piece unfolded, the beautiful movement betrayed an unfocused intent that translated into confusion in the dancers' bodies and faces.

Yamazaki's choreography is challenging. He asks his dancers to make twisted shapes that reconfigure human anatomy, and to perform difficult balances in forced arches, painstakingly slow promenades, impossibly deep, sustained lunges and plies. The spine is manipulated in every direction; the lyrical morphs into the twitchy in the blink of an eye. The movement didn't look too hard for the dancers to do, but rather to be. They had trouble with timing, rhythm, their roles vis-a-vis each other, and the sort of embodying of phrases that elevates dance from an exercise in virtuosity to an expression of artistic vision.

The dance featured a lot of Yamazaki relentlessly moving in dynamically predictable ways. He favors the slippery, released style born at the Judson Church and expanded throughout the last third of a century: accelerating and suspending movement in turns, contact improvisation-inspired lifts, legs free in the hip socket, and snaky torsos.

Still, Yamazaki knows how to shake things up, shocking us with a shift in mood in the dance's third section. After the overwrought seriousness of the first two sections--a woman flutters in arched bourree under a grotesque chandelier, a tormented man collapses under a torrent of petals--bright green garments enter the fray, someone walks in a backbend, and the whole dance tums into a French farce. A voiceover says, "Sit back, relax, close your eyes," and a samba rhythm breaks through the electronic tones. Is this a dream or a dance that should stand alone? This section revealed Yamazaki's range, his sense of humor, and his fascination with popular culture, everything from Audrey Hepbum's beguiling naivete to Michael Jackson's moonwalk.

Yamazaki is sensitive to his mentors, absorbing everything that comes his way. In time he will find his own voice, and when he does, I think it will speak loud and clear. It looks like he needs to purge himself not of his delight in movement, but in needing to keep every delectable morsel onstage. He has good ideas; he just needs to make more decisive choices. Cram less, simplify more, and make it all necessary.