Dana Iova-Koga and Mari Osanai in inkBoat’s “Clouds from a Crumbling Giant: Our Wild Shining Days”
Robbie Sweeny
The atmosphere felt subtly different at the end of “Clouds from a Crumbling Giant: Our Wild Shining Days,” the newest work from inkBoat, an international performance collective rooted in the Bay Area. The air was not electrified. The crowd wasn’t excited, exactly. Instead, something rarer was going on.
Inside Z Space, where “Clouds” had its world premiere Thursday, April 30 as part of the San Francisco International Arts Festival, the audience drifted back into the lobby possessed by a gentler energy: wonder.
“Clouds from a Crumbling Giant: Our Wild Shining Days”: InkBoat. 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday May 1-2; 3 p.m. Sunday, May 3. $35-$30. Z Space, 450 Florida St., S.F. 415-399-9554. www.sfiaf.org
To be sure, inkBoat, founded by Shinichi Iova-Koga in 1998, has long inspired astonishment, its work arresting and unclassifiable. Iova-Koga trained in Butoh, the “dance of darkness” that arose in 1950s Japan in the wake of the atom bomb’s horrors. But he has long collaborated with martial arts masters, Noh Theater practitioners, postmodern dance innovators, including the Bay Area’s legendary Anna Halprin, and many other artists.
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Five years in development, “Clouds” breaks down barriers between genres even further, drawing on a panoply of movement practices and theater traditions. Shinichi Iova-Koga and partner Dana Iova-Koga led the work’s conception and direction, but choreography and dramaturgy have also been contributed by Elke Luyten (Corporeal Mime), Jubilith Moore (Nohgaku theater), Mari Osanai (Noguchi gymnastics) and Cass Tunick (Ruth Zaporah’s Action Theater technique).
Mari Osanai in inkBoat’s “Clouds from a Crumbling Giant: Our Wild Shining Days.”
Robbie Sweeny
It’s the petite, exuberant Tunick who stands at the center of the 90-minute journey here, a soul untethered from any single incarnation. At times she’s lyrical: “My form dissolved, my body stopped being heavy, and I felt like a falling leaf,” she tells us. “I did not know whether I rode on the wind or the wind rode me.”
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At other times she’s comical. When cloth bundles of different colors drop onto the stage, apparently randomly, she reacts to each with wildly different emotions: groaning relish, timid solicitousness, chatty delight. Standing inside a chalk circle, she seems to hover between two lifetimes—an older one embodied by the eloquently inward-curling Osanai, and a younger one danced by Dana Iova-Koga.
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But a plethora of other souls eventually enter the circle, trying on many forms as they untie the cloth bundles. They discover hats, shawls and even a red suit jacket worn backwards and parade these new identities down a catwalk formed by benches. Earlier, the benches are stood up longwise to form staggered panels; later, they’re placed in the round to suggest a karaoke bar where the patrons all encourage each other to sing their hearts out. It seems like the kind of bardo you’d never want to leave, protected by the glow of a large moon that dominates Allen Willner’s lighting design.
In the work’s most stirring section, the ensemble forms a choir, harmonizing an extraordinary rendition of “Hazy Shade of Winter,” a folk rock song by Simon & Garfunkel later covered by the Bangles. Dan Cantrell plays the piano and accordion, vacillating between his own playfully fragmented score and lighter jazz numbers, including duets between the Lebanese-Armenian vocalist Khatchadour Khatchadourian and the well-known Bay Area vocalist Pamela Z, who trade verses on the charming 1928 song “If I Had You.” Tonally, this frolic is an effective foil for the recurring text drawn from Daoist teachers Lieh-tzu and Chuang-tzu: “there is being, there is non-being.”
Pamela Z, left, and Jubilith Moore in inkBoat’s “Clouds from a Crumbling Giant: Our Wild Shining Days.”
Robbie Sweeny
If being and non-being are a cycle, “Clouds” is a celebration of this churn. The truth of its subtitle, “our wild shining days,” radiates from its cast of more than two dozen. Indeed, the life of this work feels teeming, augmented by the recorded voices of both innocent children and experienced mentors. It was especially touching to hear reflections from Butoh master Hiroko Tamano, whose performance and life partner Koichi Tamano died last fall. A recording of improvisational master Ruth Zaporah, who died last summer, recalls how her family would gather to play music together every Sunday night, shouting “Ruthie, get up and dance!”
In the closing moments of “Clouds,” its onstage community members gradually follow one another in Qi Gong motions, as Cantrell plays a gorgeously bittersweet melody on a musical saw, the notes quivering like moonlight itself. What an unusual spectacle inkBoat offers, simultaneously plaintive and triumphant, with ever more layers of understanding to unfold.
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Rachel Howard is a freelance writer.