By Rita Felciano

SOME PEOPLE WOULD still rather go for a root canal than to a Butoh performance. Sitting through an evening of glacial movements by cadaverlike bodies in states of distortion is not everyone's cup of tea. Yet this indigenous Japanese art form has been part of Bay Area dance for a quarter of a century; the very fact that it can now be seen on stages the world over is some indication that Butoh speaks a universal language. It's rare that dance generates something totally unique. The development of Butoh in the late '60s (born of Japan's defeat in WWII and the country's subsequent westernization) was one of those singular moments.

If Butoh artists look like pale corpses, it's because in some ways that's what they are trying to be. What they communicate can often be ugly, dark, and utterly chaotic. But Butoh also has a lighter side – one that revels in the surreal and the absurd, as well as the vulnerability and frailty of the human condition. Butoh can actually be very funny. Once artists realized the breadth of Butoh's expressive range, some of them started veering away from the semiabstract pieces that have dominated stages for almost a generation. Two of those artists, Shinichi Momo Koga and Michael Sakamoto, recently showed Butoh-infused theater works in San Francisco that excellently demonstrate Butoh's potential.

Koga's inkBoat, in association with Footloose, presented a two-weekend run of the spellbinding and dreamy Heaven's Radio, Allen Willner's adaptation of Samuel Beckett's radio play All That Fall. Beckett, the laconic playwright in whose works language hides more than it expresses, is a natural for a Butoh interpretation, and three of the Bay Area's best Butoh practitioners, Koga, Tanya Calamoneri, and Kinji Hayashi, shared Footloose's tiny stage. A central character, Calamoneri's old woman, listened to the radio for signs of life, much the way astronomers listen to noise from outer space – as a way of trying to get in touch with a reality. Koga never looked as good as he does under Willner's firm direction, performing the Trickster who held the proverbial key, i.e., the egg from which life could emerge if its shell were to be shattered. And then there was Hayashi's Pink Baby, round and naked like an egg forever almost being born.

Sakamoto's spellbinding Glorious Day for an Unknown Woman tells the story of a benshi (a Japanese silent-film narrator) who pursues and merges with the film images of the three women he adores. Using the life story of a real benshi, a Japanese-born artist who went under the name of Musei, Sakamoto fluently slid in and out of Japanese, French, and American female characters, transitioning back into Musei between them. Sakamoto had to create a shadowy self who came to life when merging with the fleeting images of matinee idols, shedding and assuming identities like skins. It was a solo performance marked by pain, ecstasy, more than a slight sense of the absurd, and above all, a devouring emptiness.