Furukawa Anzu has studied modern dance, ballet, and butoh, as we see through the blend of styles in her solo dance concert The Crocodile Time. Her nonliteral charac-ters, or anticharaccharac-ters, transform continuously and collect emotion through time and interpretation. One cannot name them; they are signs and transparencies.
The Crocodile Time that I saw in San Francisco in 1999 represents forty years in the growth of butoh, but it is very different from Hijikata Tatsumi’s butoh be-ginning in 1959. Like Hijikata, Furukawa is a highly skilled mover, an inventive choreographer, and user of surrealist tactics. Her movement pallet is not frozen in past butoh, however. Her unpredictable movement comes directly from the heat of her personal voice and sparkling style, energetic and highly original. Con-cerning Furukawa’s choreographic orientation, Ephia Gburek, who sometimes danced in her group works, says that “humor played a central role in Furukawa’s approach toward butoh; Charlie Chaplin and Fred Astaire were perhaps more influential than the white-faced phantoms of Japan.”1
Furukawa’s performance of Crocodile creates furtive characters that glide and flip-flop across the stage. She maneuvers them in a romantically conceived moss-green velvet gown extending into a scaly-metallic crocodile tail. As she flips through stealthy twisting patterns and drags her long tail across the floor with heft and abandon, she paints the lines of the dance over and over again, her trac-ings etched colorfully in time and repeated many times, each time with slight dis-crepancies, like her deliberate eyeblinks. She performs a seriously silly solo in the center of the stage to begin, “The Crocodile Eats an Alarm Clock,” then develops
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melancholy, disjunctive afterimages. Is she referring to the clock in the crocodile in Peter Pan? Or maybe the melting watch of surrealist Salvador Dalí?
She races back and forth from center stage to sit, and sometimes leap, on the handsome French provincial desk in the downstage left corner close to the au-dience. She crouches on the desk beside a glowing candelabra and gestures with her mouth, waiting, looking out from under heavy lids before lurching forward again. She gets eaten herself, twists and writhes through space, as if being di-gested (I think). A ghost, that favorite Japanese apparition, enters into her dance, as indicated in Furukawa’s notes and the supernatural aura of her movement.
She ends the dance hypnotically, losing herself in the soaring tones of La Tra-viata and ecstasy—standing on the desk, a Dada dancer, reaching for the high notes, her whole body vibrating with the passionate vibrato of the soprano. In her notes on Crocodile Time, Furukawa explains the soporific time and physical tension mirrored in butoh and her absurd “study of a tick tock crocodile”:
In the time that slipped down from our time, a crocodile is occupied easily in sleep, on the way to eternity; there is no beginning, no middle, and no end. So there will be a dizziness of crocodile handbags. . . . Sometime just stop your breathing, you will get a red face, and taste the crocodile time.
The butoh aesthetic is avowedly dark, but as in Furukawa’s ridiculous Crocodile, it can also impart absurdity. In my 1999 interview with Kasai Akira, who danced with Hijikata early in the development of butoh, I learned that surrealism in art and theater of the absurd were important motivations for butoh, beginning with
FiGUrE 13. Furukawa Anzu in Crocodile Time, photographed in the environment rather than its theatrical setting. Photograph by Shoichi Okano, © 1999. Used by permission Shoichi Okano and Hiromi Yokoo.
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Hijikata, who was particularly inspired by the literary existentialism of Samuel Beckett, an Irishman writing his plays in French. As Kasai puts it: “Hijikata con-gealed the esoteric absurd in dance movement.”2 Like butoh, the aesthetics of the theater of the absurd is also opaque. Martin Esslin gives an example of Beckett’s plays in the latter half of the 1940s:
Things happen in Waiting for Godot, but these happenings do not constitute a plot or story; they are an image of Beckett’s intuition that nothing really ever hap-pens in man’s existence. The whole play is a complex poetic image made up of a complicated pattern of subsidiary images and themes, which are interwoven like the themes of a musical composition.3
Esslin finds antecedents for the theater of the absurd in the mimes of antiquity, commedia dell’arte, the French harlequinade, the English music hall, American vaudeville, the Expressionist and surrealist drama of the early twentieth century, the Keystone Kops, Dadaism, the Marx brothers’ movies, and Bertolt Brecht’s epic theater in its use of music hall knockabout and its preoccupation with the fluidity of the self. Esslin traces relationships through the Dada movement and German Expressionism to early Brecht and surrealism, and he notices how the puzzling irrationality in the procedures of the theater of the absurd closely re-sembles the Zen koan riddle in its resistance to reason.4
I do not suggest that butoh resurrects theater of the absurd, but it does contain historical residue. Butoh, however original, has a kinesthetic memory, imagistic as well as methodological. Its absurdities, riddles, and shape-shifting have a reason.
If theater of the absurd often saw the universe as bleak and meaningless, butoh does not. It shares a Zen Buddhist, surrealist, and Jungian belief in the healing potential of the unconscious mind. Darkness in butoh, like the nothingness (or emptiness) of Buddhism, can clear away personal history to allow being (itself) to shine. But butoh is not Buddhist by design; it operates more theatrically.
We see this clearly in the absurd elements of Furukawa’s works, especially her incongruous style, playful and bizarre but carrying serious import. Crocodile is playfully tense, while her work Goya, as we explore in the next essay, is darkly serious. Furukawa’s highly visual dances—political, strange, and comic—reach behind surrealism and theater of the absurd to their historical sources in Dada. I see her butoh as culturally eclectic and original as Dance Dada. In its improvisa-tory expressiveness, her dance bears a methodological similarity to surrealism. In its antiart, antiwar sentiments, it renews Dadaism, the passionate cultural move-ment that began in neutral Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and reached its high point from about 1916 to 1920. Dada’s antiwar activities included poetry, visual art, public gatherings, demonstrations, and publications. This movement influenced later styles of art, including theater of the absurd and surrealism, and it ranged in its expressive modes from social critique to absurd and comic forms.
Crocodile Time 115 In Furukawa’s conceptual approach, she reminds me most of the important bridge between Dada and surrealism, Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), a French-born American artist whose work played a major role in the direction of twenti-eth-century art, also influencing the late modern and postmodern dance. Duch-amp helped introduce Cubism and Dada to the United States and was influential in the surrealist movement of the 1920s and 1930s. Through his emphasis on the intellectual aspects of art, his influence extended to 1960s conceptual art and to the late modern work of dancers like Merce Cunningham. Even later, the ten-dency of postmodern dance in America toward the use of nontechnical everyday movement might well be traced to Duchamp’s ready-made art—found objects such as his bicycle wheel turned upside down and mounted on a kitchen stool (1913) and the urinal entitled Fountain (1917) that he displayed as sculpture.
Duchamp functioned in between Dada and surrealism with these found ob-jects that became known as “readymades” and his masterpiece called “The Large Glass,” or The Bride Stripped Bare of Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23)—an abstract bride imprisoned in machinery. If he took inspiration from found objects, the final display was not left to chance or improvisation, and his Bride was intricately conceptual and concrete. Furukawa’s work is also clearly focused for the eye, and her improvisatory vivacity occurs within tight choreographic structures. It is ap-parent that her dances, however eccentric, can be repeated and are not simply open fields for experiment. At the same time, her cross-referenced structures, from reptile tails to candelabras, leave room for the improvisatory moment of awareness. Her ricochet of sight and thought, the changing center of eye and mind, like the phased shifts of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), give fresh sense to the time and space of dance. Similar also to Duchamp with his readymades, Furukawa’s dances negate art as commerce. I have seen people leave her performances in disgust, or maybe just because they expect a finish.
The time element of her butoh is tactile and endured, using eternally slow time and stillness against wildness and frenzy. The cathartic endings so typical in butoh do not arrive in Furukawa’s work; such endings often produce spiritual tranquility at the finish, as in Natsu Nakajima’s prophetic transformations—from a grinning insect, to a ghost, to the Buddhist goddess Kannon at the end of her dance Niwa (The Garden). Furukawa’s dance provides an exception to butoh transformations. Her unfinished, highly detailed dances leave us curious, emo-tionally spent, and still vibrating.
Furukawa’s vision crosses stylistically between two worlds. She turns Euro-pean and American appropriation of the Far East on its head, incorporating the historic avant-garde of the West in her dance—from the Impressionists to Dada and the surrealists—which reflect Japan’s virtue for detail and abstraction that we explored in chapter 1.