Ka Cho Fu Getsu.

For many American viewers the Japanese art of ankoku butoh-ha ("dance of darkness") requires some mental adjustment. Our eyes are accustomed to dance as an essentially active endeavor that expresses meaning through emphatic physicality. And even with the most abstract modern dance we tend to interpret any action as if it were necessarily pursuing a linear narrative path. But butoh explodes these limits and beckons us, instead, to slip into its seductive realm of vibrant stasis.

In the New York premiere of his Ka Cho Fu Getsu ("Flowers-Birds-Wind-Moon"), Kazuo Ohno, an 87-year-old master practitioner of butoh, portrays a number of characters; he inhabits their souls. He is first a dry, bent man in a white suit, edging inexorably onstage. His progression pauses momentarily, then he exits through the opposite wing. With the spare information relayed by the set of his torso, the texture of his step, Ohno implies a more epic journey marred midway by crisis. Later, Ohno appears in a tattered white Victorian dress and fur-brimmed hat. He walks, punctuating his gait with delicate hitches of his shoulders. He sinks, helpless, into the folds of his costume's massive train. The tilt of his wavering head suggests tragedy and, at the same time, the latent absurdity of many a calamitous situation.

Ohno will also run point blank at the ridiculous, as with his depiction of a hapless fellow clad only in briefs who tugs a short red table behind him. Ohno binds the legs of his prop with rope, tries to squeeze himself under it, and then crawls away, expecting his inanimate friend to follow. His endearing, witty play reads doubly as childishness and senility. in each solo, intention and indication take the place of action, and over the course of slow-ticking seconds Ohno's dancing becomes a revelatory state of being.

Ohno's son, Yoshito Ohno, generally plays the straight man - although he did impersonate a bizarre soccer-kicking maiden and a large-headed horse. Yoshito fares best with more indeterminate characters, monklike figures whose precise, minute hand gestures seem to hold the secrets of the world.

In the final vignette of the program, Kazuo Ohno scampered across the space as a young girl, and from the heavens, to the strains of "On the Beautiful Blue Danube," spilled innumerable rainbow-hued chiffon scarves. The butoh of the Ohnos plunges us into a time warp of intense imagery, deep mystery, and wild fantasy. Here dances unfold with the eccentric abandon of dreams.