SANKAI JUKU ON TOUR.

WASHINGTON--Butoh can be challenging to watch, since the often extraordinarily slow movement's aching drive to convey the subconscious can be exhausting, as well as exhilarating. Writing about the modern Japanese dance form can be equally challenging, as it is essentially about the language of the body. But one company worth both writing about and watching is Sankai Juku, whose rich explorations of humanity have mesmerized audiences worldwide.

The company's fall U.S. tour continues in November with performances at Brooklyn Academy of Music (November 10 to 14), Pennsylvania State University (November 16), and George Washington University in Washington, D.C. (November 19 and 20). The troupe performs Hiyomeki, an evening-long work that means "Within a Gentle Vibration and Agitation."

Hiyomeki is described most poignantly in a poem of the same title written by Sankai Juku's founder and artistic director, Ushio Amagatsu. It reads, in part: "The speed of consciousness and the distance / of movement, / The speed of the body. All carefully treated. / When one arrives at imagining infinity / the body moves nearly at the speed of light, / and nears an almost unlimited stillness." Movement does not exist in and of itself for Amagatsu in Hiyomeki. Rather, it is a result of the body relating to the floor, to gravity, and to other people. It is an inherently physical expression of purely ethereal concepts, including "multiple centers," "infinity," and "imagination."

Marking the passage of time in Hiyomeki is 1,000 pounds of fine sand that trickles down from the ceiling onto the stage throughout the performance. As is common in butoh, the Sankai Juku dancers have shaved heads and are completely covered in white rice powder. Different explanations have been forwarded for what this stark costuming represents: a generic human figure to whom butoh's universal themes of life and death apply; an otherworldly effect, as if the dancers' souls were being worn on the outside; or, in the words of Amagatsu, the performers' "innocence, wonder, fear, and mortality." The all-male company communicates its rendition of these abstract concepts to an equally mystifying piano and synthesizer score by Takashi Kako and Yoichiro Yoshikawa.

Butoh arose out of the Japanese avant-garde of the 1960s, when the country struggled with the aftershock of Hiroshima. Originally called "ankoku butoh," or "dance of darkness," the medium created a space for the intensely grotesque and perverse on the stage. The unique dance form has since evolved, with companies such as Sankai Juku (literally "studio of mountain and sea") incorporating elements that suggest the beautiful and the divine, along with the gnarl and distortion of its reactionary beginnings.

As with many contemporary American modern dance choreographers, some of today's butoh masters--including Amagatsu--have actually studied with the movement's founders. Under the guidance of Tatsumi Hijikata (1928-1986), Amagatsu learned to abandon his classical dance training in favor of improvisation and subjective interpretation. While there is no technique, per se, to butoh, training is arduous. Sankai Juku dancers have been known to rehearse from nine at night until five in the morning, for example, increasing the physical and emotional challenge.

Watching butoh can be grueling if expectations of traditional dance performance are not shed at the theater door. And writing about butoh is best left to poetry--language's own medium for capturing the intensity and abstraction of human emotion. In Amagatsu's own words at the end of Hiyomeki, "The vital connection between voluntary movement / and gravity / The body continually vibrates and is agitated / between the two."