by Leigh Witchel
A cookbook with one great recipe in it is still worth it. There was one really novel idea in Karole Armitage’s “You Took a Part of Me,” and if the rest felt more familiar, that made it still worth it.
Armitage’s latest project is based on her fascination with Japanese culture and noh theater. A sub-genre, mugen noh is a play where a ghost or spirit recounts a story as a meditation on her life. “You Took a Part of Me” bounced off of “Nonomiya” (Shrine in the Fields), a play based on characters from the thousand-year old masterpiece, “The Tale of Genji,” where Lady Rokujō struggles to overcome her passions and the vengeful desires of her spirit.
Armitage and her team took from sources in modern and ancient Japan. A square was marked off onstage, with tubes of lighting on the floor and ceiling, strikingly and simply designed by Clifton Taylor in cool gray and icy fluorescence. A thrust platform was built out into the audience – this was supposed to take noh’s offstage “mirror room” and the bridge leading to it and render them visible to the audience. What this actually looked more like was the ramp on a kabuki stage. The musician Yuki Isami, composed by Reiko Yamada, playing a western flute and amplified shamisen, was at the left side. That lined up with Indian tradition; in noh, musicians would be at the back, where Armitage placed the dancers at times. Isami’s instruments were also closer to kabuki.
We first saw Megumi Eda as The Ghost and Sierra French as Her Double back to back in severe white outfits designed by Peter Speliopoulos. They faced us, joined by their long black wigs, like Siamese twins joined at the hair. They pointed with their fingers outwards and then to their own genitals, holding hands as their heads twitched. Eda walked off to the end of the thrust.
Alonso Guzman, dressed in stylish black knits with his turtleneck pulled up to swallow the bottom half of his face, was a high-fashion kōken. A kōken (Japanese for “staff”) was the black-clad attendant in noh. Guzman offered Eda hair picks, held a mirror so she could coif herself by rolling her chignon and affixing the pins, and moved her chair when she left.
Heading back to the main space, Eda arched and stretched, as French mimicked her decorative motions. Armitage has a type, and both women fit it; tall and long, and move extravagantly. French has gorgeously arched feet. Eda, who has worked with Armitage since 2004, is older now. She was sometimes unsteady in balance but also beautifully poised and wrathful.
Her Lover, danced by Cristian Laverde-Koenig, sat on a box on the thrust and he walked to the stage shielding his eyes. Eda did the same and they mirrored one another in a slow adagio to flute. She draped on his back and matched his steps.
The kōken removed their shirts carefully, but ripped off their breakaway pants in an act both magical and violent. The lovers were left in the briefest of briefs made of a narrow black band, Eda’s breasts artfully concealed by a flesh-toned leotard. The duet continued in sex positions straight out of Japanese shunga. He crawled on her as they wrapped together into a knot of limbs and legs.
Eda sat on the stage and Laverde-Koenig backed away. She bit her hand to begin a solo, a gesture with several possible meanings, from anger and contempt to the need to keep silent. Her lover and her double returned and danced a slow, twisty adagio as Eda crouched to the side. The kōken again disrobed the dancers and the two women danced in their briefs, walking, posing, tapping the ground with their feet. Laverde-Koenig had been sitting on the thrust impassively. He ran back on and with French, pulled at Eda. It turned into shunga again, a pile of all three dancers locked together tongue in groove like Japanese woodwork
The kōken reentered to clothe Eda in a spare white jacket and pants with wide legs as chic as couture. The Lover and Double crouched behind, leaving the woman. The kōken quietly shadowed Eda and in one simple yet brilliant moment, suddenly lifted her straight up. It was the most basic partnering move, not one that indicated any feeling between the two, but simply to give her more hang time. That is what a kōken is, staff, and Armitage’s link of it to the western idea of a ballet porteur was a congruence so apt it seemed amazing it hadn’t been done already.
After, he assisted her in undoing her careful coif. She redid it into a disheveled topknot held with a single pin, then pulled the pin out and held it like a weapon or fencer’s sword. Her hair tumbling in front of her face, it hid her cryptically in shame or transformation before she revealed herself from behind her tresses to sit on the thrust as the lights went out.
Armitage did her homework, and did it omnivorously, throwing in references from Murasaki Shikibu to Rei Kawakubo, with classical Japanese porn in between. You didn’t need to know all the references to follow what she was doing, but “You Took a Part of Me” was made for aficionados of Japanese culture, and without that knowledge, it could be unclear.
Like traditional Japanese theater, “You Took a Part of Me” took place in a clock time that wasn’t easy for Westerners used to action and plot. Much of it was slow going. But to a New York dance audience, how fascinating were the distant echoes of “Bugaku.” Fifty-five years after Balanchine, Armitage also looked at Japan through Western eyes, closely noting its high art, but magnetically drawn to its erotic landscape in her imagination.
copyright © 2019 by Leigh Witchel
“You Took a Part of Me” – Karole Armitage
Japan Society, New York, NY
April 12, 2019
Cover: Cristian Laverde-Koenig and Megumi Eda in “You Took a Part of Me.” Photo © Julie Lemberger.
Got something to say about this? Sound off here
[Don’t miss a thing! We’ll send you a notification of every article we post if you sign up with your email. (The signup is right below, scroll down). We promise you won’t be deluged and we won’t spam you either.]
