Mitsuyo Uesugi, Uno Man.

Sharing a program in the Studio/Theatre, two Japanese soloists, Mitsuyo Uesugi and Uno Man, suggested the range of butoh. Uesugi's 1993 She (Kanojo) is excruciatingly slow and often grotesque in its evocation of childbirth, witches, and balletic bows. But Man's Megami-n--The Eyes of Nemesis is more diverse (and often faster). Although Man begins by evoking a white-clad ghost in a graveyard, he later becomes a fig-leafed faun dodging a shaft of light, a monkey or an idiot in a suit walking a tightrope, then a liquid, almost jazzy dancer.

Not coincidentally, these two soloists performed on the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. Seen in that context, the imagery each of them eventually arrived at--gazing up at the sky--was particularly haunting, reminding us of a tragic fact of human history, the atomic reality which we will never now escape.