Photo: Paul Kolnik

Sleeping Beauty
New York City Ballet

Performed at: New York State Theater
Reviewed on 2/25/04
by Eri Misaki
Translated by Blake Gilson

Sleeping Beauty is one of the rare classic works performed by New York City Ballet, whose repertory mainly consists of contemporary ballets. While the story closely follows Marius Petipa's original choreography, what stands out about this production by Peter Martins is the use of Bournonville-like quick and intricate footwork, evoking the influence of Martins's native Denmark.

Sleeping Beauty 's story is well known. King Florestan and his queen invite all their people to the christening of their newborn daughter, Princess Aurora, where she is blessed by her fairy godmothers. The witch Carabosse, however, furious at not being invited, prophesies that when the little princess reaches adulthood, she will prick her finger with a spindle and die. But the Lilac Fairy, as her blessing to Aurora, changes Carabosse's curse from death to merely a long sleep, from which the princess can be awakened only by a prince.

Aurora grows up into a beautiful young woman. On her sixteenth birthday, Carabosse, disguised as an ordinary old woman, gives the princess a bouquet of flowers in which she has hidden a spindle. Aurora pricks her finger and immediately falls into a deep sleep, along with all the people in the castle. One hundred years later, the Lilac Fairy appears before Prince Désiré, who seeks true love, and guides him to the place where Aurora lies sleeping. At one kiss from the Prince, Aurora awakens from her long sleep, and so does everyone else. The ballet ends in a magnificent wedding and coronation ceremony for the young couple.

The choreography moves at a fast clip throughout this production, so the scenes develop very quickly. The pace is a little easier through the princess's falling asleep and up to the prince's appearance during the first act. The second act, however, seems rushed—the witch summarily dealt with when she tries to interfere with the Prince, the kiss coming and going almost in the blink of an eye—and it feels like the audience is being hurried along to the final wedding scene. Casting the wonderful Maria Kowroski as Carabosse is a case in point: Not enough time is given to the character to make proper use of her abilities. The frantic pace of the production unfortunately makes this classic ballet look cheap.

Alexandra Ansanelli, a dancer at her peak, played Aurora, while the role of Prince Désiré was danced by Nilas Martins. Ansanelli danced beautifully, her line graceful and her movements bold and steady. Martins, on the other hand, was less convincing as Aurora's passionate lover. Amanda Hanks, as the Lilac Fairy, is a relative newcomer, but she carried off this major role rather well. The highlight of the performance was certainly the Blue Bird, danced by Joaquin De Luz, who recently moved to NYCB from American Ballet Theater. He brought his role powerfully to life, giving the audience what it wanted with sudden, high jumps and countless pirouettes. The performance also garnered applause with many appearances by School of American Ballet's young dancers, who were by turns lovely and dignified.

(Updated on 6/17/05)

Photo: William W. Irwin

Headlong Dance Theater

You Are So Beautiful
Arrow Dance Communication
Performed at: Japan Society
Reviewed on on 2/13/04
by Eri Misaki

The first dance production to arise from the Japan Society Performing Arts Department’s new Japanese-U.S. Residency Exchange Program for dancers was shown at the Japan Society in February 2004. The Residency Exchange Program is a project in which contemporary dance groups from America and Japan visit one another’s communities in order to exchange ideas, methods, and so on. In the program’s first year, Kyoto’s Arrow Dance Communication group made and deepened ties with Philadelphia’s Headlong Dance Theater. The project gave birth to a piece, You Are So Beautiful, a fruit of mutual understanding between the two companies.

The work depicts how two completely different troupes work together through trial and error. First, the American troupe’s choreographer coaches three Japanese dancers through a routine. As the two groups cannot understand one another’s languages at all, the Japanese dancers continue to follow the choreographer’s rapid-fire stream of English instructions, relying mostly on their imaginations, speaking to each other in Kyoto dialect. A little later, we see the Japanese coach assigning a routine to three American dancers. This time it is the same problem in reverse: the Americans can’t understand the Japanese instructions, and there is a good amount of confusion. However, despite these difficulties, the two groups at last come up with a finished product. While it may not be a perfect reflection of the two choreographers’ original ideas, the result is a fresh, novel performance. The dance troupes’ determined struggle to understand even while running into the language barrier drew roars of laughter from the audience.

In between and after these two episodes, postmodern dance created by the two groups of dancers unfolds further. The show uses music from both Japan and America, and dancers of each troupe partner dancers from the other. As the dance ends, the two groups bow reverently to one another, Japanese-style. One of the male Japanese dancers can sing an American pop song in broken English, and the American dancers even speak a little simple Japanese. In one scene, the American ans Japanese dancers compromise by sitting on the little stools used for bathing in japan. In these fragments of episodes, seeing the difference in culture and way of thinking between Japan and America demonstrated onstage, you find yourself laughing. Meanwhile the dance continues, and at a certain point you discover that the two groups are communicating, albeit wordlessly. At the end, one female dancer takes up a microphone and sings out “You are so beautiful!” With that, the entire company sings together. All the dancers are drawn together as one.

A comical depiction of the meeting of minds through the wordless communication of dance, resulting from the residency exchange between the two troupes, the work is truly convincing and emotionally evocative. Perhaps the artists who created this dance themselves understand and tried to compensate for the self-satisfied tone of much contemporary dance. Accordingly they created it first, and the significance comes out when seen by an audience.

* For further information about the Japanese-U.S. Residency Exchange Program, see the Winter 2004 issue of our quarterly hard copy magazine, The Arts Cure, currently being sold in major bookstores and at the Sansha NY store.

(Updated on 3/2/05)

You may not love what Paul Taylor does, but no one can deny he is a superb craftsman. I was particularly struck by this aspect of his work when his company performed at City Center in March. The bill I saw—Runes, Le Grand Puppetier, and Mercuric Tidings—achieved neither the transcendent abstraction nor the jawdropping perversity that make Taylor’s best work so enchanting, yet much of the evening was constructed as meticulously and harmoniously as fine cabinetry. Runes, which premiered in 1975, shows its age in its Graham-like fascination with primitive ritual. Images of sacrifice, warring clans, and sexualized ritual struggle alternate, communicated through Taylor’s usual movement vocabulary. But the construction is sound, and there are some striking moments, such as when a solo by Michael Trusnovec is framed, upstage and downstage, by two endless streams of dancers flowing across the stage in opposite directions. The company looks strong and assured, smoothly transitioning from one formation to another with the elegant efficiency of a school of fish—the perfect instrument for Taylor’s handsome structures. Le Grand Puppetier, a world premiere, seems a rare attempt at topicality, albeit poetically couched. Taylor’s take on Petrushka (set to Stravinsky’s music performed on the pianola), the piece is an allegory of the corrupting effect of power; the intriguing twist ending brought to my mind the coup against President Aristide, who disbanded the Haitian army and thereby, it could be said, left himself vulnerable to the return of dictatorship. Although this piece is both too muddled and too literal to succeed wholly—tellingly, structure bows to narrative in this case—it contains some great sequences. Thanks to Santo Loquasto, visually the piece is gorgeous, the costumes a sinister Candyland of jewel-toned satins against the breathtaking set design. As for Mercuric Tidings, the company performs this abstract, balletic work well, but they’re modern dancers—they don’t have quite the technical clarity for so much petit allegro. (The piece is also marred, as is Runes, by Taylor’s penchant for astonishingly unflattering costumes.) In the end, what floats the piece is structure, the way one little story blends seamlessly into another; the movement itself is rather dull. Although in one bright, happy section, two bands of dancers greet each other, grinning and raising their hands in hello from opposite wings—a delightful moment. Not everything that comes from the hand of dance’s master carpenter is great or even very good. But his dances won’t chip, crack, or split with age. A Taylor piece is built to last.

Artistic excellence? ***
Entertainment? ***
Inventiveness? ***
Healing power? ***

(Updated on 1/15/05)

Photo: Josis Jan Bos

Jiri Kylíàn, principal choreographer of the Nederlands Dans Theater, has been exploring movement with the company for over twenty years. In the recent double program at BAM, his fans saw one 1978 piece, Symphony of Psalms to the Stravinsky score, and four twenty-first century pieces to the repetitive electronic music of Dirk Haubrich. The pieces trace a retreat from ecstasy and emotion and the supplanting of the physical by the intellectual. The recurring use of mirrors in the later pieces suggests the ever-present mind watching the body as it moves less and less. It seems as if Kylíàn has tried to strip away all extranea to find out what, exactly, movement consists of. The answer for him may be "stillness." Certain elements of liveliness remain, however. Props are incorporated into his pieces with humor and ingenuity, and he continues to create amazing shapes—single sculptures formed out of two bodies—that are haunting in their beauty and strangeness. In the later pieces, Kylíàn has largely abandoned the search for his own movement vocabulary and has given in to the prevailing mode of post-modernism. The Nederlands dancers are so exquisitely trained that they make the vagueness of pomo look like they are floating in some magical medium. But even they cannot save the vocabulary from its basic repetitiveness.

The one piece not by Kylíàn in the two evenings was choreographed by Johan Inger, formerly a dancer with the Nederlands and now artistic director of the Cullberg Ballet in his native Sweden. Inger's piece, Walking Mad, is not about the intellect. It is about sex. It is also about loneliness and togetherness, happiness and despair, and everything else that is part of sex and love. Though Inger also uses post-modernist vocabulary, he manages to squeeze an amazing amount of emotion out of it. It was interesting that the artistic director of the company, Anders Hellström, and Kylíàn himself, now the company's artistic advisor, felt that this very human piece should be their final image of the New York season.

Artistic excellence? ****
Entertainment? ***
Inventiveness? ***
Healing power? **

(Updated on 5/7/04)

Photo: Max Vadukul

Karole Armitage’s career has included stints with Balanchine and Cunningham and notoriety, in the 1980s, as the “punk ballerina” who danced on pointe in nightclubs to rock music. Today Armitage’s focus is still on bending genres, as seen inTime Is the Echo of an Axe Within a Wood (its title taken from a Philip Larkin poem), premiered at the Joyce in March.

Artist David Salle has created a glittery silver curtain of ropes that encircles three sides of the stage; tiny red lights, like the lights of a nighttime city, appear in the blackness beyond the curtain, glinting off the silver, bronze, and gold leotards worn by the dancers. Time opens with a spiky, melancholy solo from the beautiful Megumi Eda, who drifts like a leitmotif through the rest of the piece. Around her, couples form, split apart, and reform; notable is the powerful Theresa Ruth Howard, shaken so her head snaps by William Isaac, the writhing line of her body achieving the assymetrical punch of the music by Bartok. At times, Armitage crafts delicate gestures or awkward contortions that feel real, but these moments are submerged in a sea of unmeaning ballet tricks and Forsythean twitching and wriggling. Spatially, the dance’s patterns are repetitive, andTime never builds into a coherent statement.

The end of the piece devolves bizarrely with the entrance of club dancer Bendeleon, voguers Mecca and Aviance, and Bharata Natyam dancer Sharmila Desai. The first three contort their arms and wrists at high speed, while Desai does yoga-like poses, but the other dancers don’t seem affected by their presence. The guest artists seem to be in another piece entirely, and this reviewer saw no meaningful melding of genres in the juxtaposition.

Armitage makes some perplexing missteps, as when Leo Arpon runs across the stage, his hand rippling the silver curtain, a moment robbed of subtlety by the accompanying windchime trill in the music. (Has Armitage seen Annamaria de Keersmaeker’s vastly superior Rain, one wonders, which employs a very similar curtain and gesture?) But she also creates genuinely lovely moments, as when the annoying chaos of dancers and guest artists is banished by Eda’s entrance, as the lights dim and galaxies of red lights spring up in the darkness behind the curtain. Is this what Armitage was searching for, this sense of wonder in the face of the infinite and mysterious? Eda reaches for the stars, and it’s heart-in-your-throat beautiful. If only the rest of the piece had so much poetry.

(Updated on 8/12/04)

Photo: Rolline Laporte

This is choreographer Hélène Blackburn’s first assay into children’s theatre and she has begun, if not finished, well. The opening of the show is a series of tiny monologues, enhanced by gestures that blend American Sign Language, exaggerated expressive gestures anyone might use, and abstractions of the two. The performers serve as a Greek chorus to whomever is central, repeating, underlining, and contesting. We know the fears shamefacedly admitted to by the performers, who present themselves as youngish children, are true because we ourselves remember them. Perhaps we, too, are still a little bit afraid and ashamed of our fears: thunder, being alone, the dark, being different. Perhaps we, too, know that in our innermost places we are still children. The beginning of the show is strong and poignant, no matter what your age.

The problems start when the pure dance sections of the show start. Rather than daring to capitalize on the gestures and emotions that she has begun to explore, Ms. Blackburn retreats to po-mo movements that we have all seen and that lack any resonance, much less the deep resonance of fears we bring with us from childhood. Is she perhaps afraid to confront her own fears?

With great charm the five performers walk the line of being childlike without talking or acting down to the children of the audience. They are honest and open when they act. But they, like their artistic director, do not know how to connect the dance movements to the deep feelings they have stirred up.

Artistic excellence? **
Entertainment? **
Inventiveness? **
Healing power? **

(Updated on 4/9/04)

Photo: Holger Badekow

John Neumeier, the American expatriate dancer/choreographer/company director, has found great acceptance and acclaim in Europe. Hamburg, to be exact—the city whose name his company bears, where he established a ballet school and where he stages his frequent full-length productions in the city's old-world opera house. Combining modern movement and the classical dance vocabulary, Neumeier's New York offering this February was Nijinsky, his own interpretation of the sad, short, creative life of the great dancer Vaslav Nijinsky.

With a nod to the sketches of Bakst and Benois, Neumeier is credited with the choreography, sets, costumes, and lighting concept of this production. The ballet begins with the beautiful setting of Nijinsky's last public performance, in the salon of a Swiss hotel. With an already fragile grasp on reality, Nijinsky is seen in a reverie; his greatest moments appear, as visions of his great roles and colleagues from the Ballets Russes dance around and with him. The Golden Slave, the Sylphide, the tennis players from his ballet Jeux, Diaghilev, his sister Bronislava and wife RomolaÙall appear, dancing in and out of his thoughts in character and costume in a phatasmagorical review of his life and career. Colorful and imaginatively staged, the first section successfully calls to mind Nijinsky's power as a mesmerizing performer, imaginative choreographer, and the creativity that infused Diaghilev's company.

The work begins to deteriorate, however, in the second half, when Neumeier offers his interpretive spin on the dancer's descent into madness. Neumeier mixes family memories and interpersonal experiences with parallels between bare-chested, marching soldiers in uniform and Nijinsky's own shouted rehearsal counts for his Sacre de Printemps. As if the dancer's own deterioration due to schizophrenia were not enough, we must also sit through Nijinsky's brother's contorted, tortured writhing, as he too goes mad.

Although Neumeier's dancers are uniformly gifted, and Jiri Bubenicek performed admirably in the title role, in the end we feel very little for Nijinsky, where we should feel grieved for the tragedy that was his life. Such are the distractions of the choreographer's overlays of war and nearly naked chorus boys. The score, which weaves together excerpts of Chopin, Schumann, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Shostakovich, was fine. In the end, Nijinsky's life need not be overly dramatized. Well told, it would hold drama enough for a ballet.

Artistic excellence? ***
Entertainment? ***
Inventiveness? ***
Healing power? ***

(Updated on 4/14/04)

Photo: Carol Rosegg

Fiddler on the Roof
Performed at the Minskoff Theater
Reviewed on 3/23/04
by Tamsin Nutter

There are some shows it’s hard to spoil. The Mikado is one; Fiddler on the Roof, the beloved 1964 musical about a Jewish village in Tsarist Russia, is another. Jerry Bock’s score captures the aching melancholy and irresistable dance-tunes of traditional Jewish music, Jerome Robbins’ choreography is full of zing, and Sholom Aleichem’s original story, as rendered through Joseph Stein’s book and Sheldon Harnick’s lyrics, retains its epic sweep and loving humanism.

But even deathless material takes you only so far. The production of Fiddler now running on Broadway, directed by David Leveaux and starring Alfred Molina, is big, expensive, well-crafted, and slick. Perhaps that’s its problem, because the ragged, emotional spirit that made the 1971 film so ravishing and sad is almost entirely missing.

The dairyman Tevye is one of the great roles in musical theater—his everyman cunning, his doomed struggle to hold onto his masculine authority, his familiar relationship with God, his half-ashamed soft-heartedness toward his stubborn daughters—and he embodies the musical’s central conflict: It’s 1905, and the times they are a-changing, even in the insular village of Anatevka. As Tevye, Molina is strong but not inspired, too muted to ever electrify the rest of the show. The other actors give lesser but competent performances, although I found the chorus’s varying accents distracting. Randy Graff is fierce and funny as Tevye’s wife Golde; Sally Murphy and John Cariani are much too twitchy as Tzeitel and her lover Motel; Laura Michelle Kelly sings beautifully as Hodel; Tricia Paoluccio gives a relatively nuanced portrayal of the bookish Chava; and Robert Petkoff is charismatic as the revolutionary Perchik.

Nancy Opel seems jarringly noisy as the matchmaker Yente, but perhaps the problem is the surrounding performances, set at too low a level. Exuberance does not preclude delicacy, and both are needed in a show like Fiddler, which simultaneously celebrates, castigates, and mourns the life of the shtetl—its fullness and its narrowness—as that old life inevitably gives way to the new.

Leveaux’s staging ranges from the magical “Sabbath Prayer” to the surprisingly stodgy “Tevye’s Dream.” Tom Pye’s gorgeous grove of leafless birch trees surrounds and invades the stage; the musicians sit among them, lit by hanging oil lamps, against a changing sky. Other set elements are less successful, such as the section of wooden roof which periodically descends from above carrying the titular fiddler. Like too many things in this production, the conceit of the fiddler—Jewish heartbreak and resilience personified—feels contrived, where it should be poetry.

Artistic excellence? ***
Was it entertaining? ***
Was it inventive? ***
Was it healing? ***

(Updated on 7/26/04)

Photo: Jonathan Slaff

Tulips and Cadavers
Performed at Theater for the New City
Reviewed on 3/27/04
by R. Pikser

Rembrandt van Rijn, the 17th-century Dutch painter, reached his commercial apogee at the same time that the great tulip craze pushed Holland’s financial markets to ridiculous heights. Rembrandt, like many of his contemporaries, explored the play of shadow and light, but he was the master, bar none. He went beyond other artists in that he was the first painter to try to show the souls of his subjects, as opposed to their mere external appearance. He was also self-absorbed, jealous, querulous, greedy, litigious, and a womanizer. In 1669, the year to which this play-within-a-mind takes us, Rembrandt is dying, but he takes us on a museum tour of some of his most famous paintings, telling us how to read them from the inside—his inside, and that of his times.

This portrait of the painter was written by one of Off-Off-Broadway’s most renowned playwrights, Jimmy Camicia, originally of Hot Peaches, one of the first gender-bending theater companies. Mr. Camicia has brought sympathy and sharp analysis of character and the paintings to his wisecracking hustler of a Rembrandt, filling in himself for the ailing Harvey Tavel, another Off-Off icon, who hopes to return to the show. Craig Meade ably plays all of the wives and mistresses, as well as the playwright writing this play. But Crystal Field steals the show with her poverty-stricken, sweet-tempered harridan of a model, cum Death, cum the Spirit of Art, cum History, and who knows what else.

The direction is that of a highly staged reading, but this does not distract, because one has time to contemplate the play’s silent characters, the projections of Rembrandt’s paintings themselves. Only at the play’s end, when Rembrandt is dead and there is no painting to relate to, does one wish for a larger break with the previous directorial style. But the thrust of the play and the performances remain to inform any future visits we may have with this revolutionary painter.

Artistic excellence? ****
Entertainment? ****
Inventiveness? ***
Healing power? ***

(Updated on 7/26/04)

Odyssey: The Homecoming
Performed at La MaMa E.T.C
Reviewed on 2/27/04 by Celeste Sunderland

Loneliness and solitude pervade the psyche. Perhaps the separation of a husband and wife, and the struggle of a soldier at war evoke these emotions most strongly. In Odyssey: The Homecoming, part two of her Trojan War trilogy, Theodora Skipitares demonstrates that even legendary war heroes suffer from sorrow and estrangement, and that ancient Greek myths hold their relevancy today.

Penelope (Meredith Wright) illuminated a colorful, hand-painted Rajasthani scroll while speaking and singing the story of her husband Odysseus' journey home from the Trojan War. Despite this vibrant introduction, a sense of unease filled the play. Perched on the back of a crawling puppeteer, a model of the Walter Reed Army Hospital passed by accompanied by the moans of war's wounded (the hospital overflowed with casualties from Iraq and Afghanistan last summer). In the next scene, our hero, a five-foot, half-naked, Bunraku-style puppet, manipulated by three puppeteers, dragged his weary body through shimmering, iridescent strips of fabric turned Aegean Sea. Once ashore, three puppets with cloth bodies and human heads assaulted the tired, war-torn hero with questions that a psychiatrist might ask a war veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder: "Did you lose many men?""Did you kill?"

In adherence to the Bunraku tradition of examining conflicts between social duty and human emotions, Odysseus entertained the group. Shadow puppets resembling Greek vase paintings animated his marvelous tales as his cottony body and scraggly gray hair shook with despair. He described characters with full, often humorous personalities, like the fearsome Cyclops with his wobbly phallus, who swallowed three of Odysseus' companions. And the alluring Circe, with her cunning call, "Hey boys, you look like you could use a drink," who then turned them into swine. Music composed by Arnold Dreyblatt and Tim Schellenbaum and recorded by members of Bang On A Can contributed harshly amorphous soundscapes. With heavy percussion and electronic repetition, the score heightened tense situations and complemented the visuals, particularly during Odysseus' passage through the Land of the Dead. A foggy, surreal world, depicted by a smoke machine and four jars of dry ice, this was the play's most ethereal and beautiful scene. Black-clad figures with video screens showing one enormous eye, mesmerized by the elusive substance overflowing the jars, seemed to wonder what occurred within, like heavenly spirits peering with disbelief toward life on Earth.

Artistic excellence? ***
Was it entertaining? ****
Was it inventive? ***
Was it healing? ***

(Updated on 4/26/04)

Photo: Courtesy of Compania El Tridente

Literature is so transporting that it can move us to violence, as Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes demonstrated in his 17th-century masterpiece Don Quixote de la Mancha. In one deranged moment, the title character, affected by the closing scene of a puppet show, lops off the puppets' heads with a sweep of his sword.

Spanish composer Manuel de Falla's one-act opera Master Peter's Puppet Show, based on the above-mentioned chapter in the Cervantes book, employs two sets of puppets. Large puppets portray the people, and small ones play the characters in the "puppet show within a puppet show,"which tells the tale of Melisendra and her rescue from Moorish captivity by her husband Don Gayferos.

In February the Brooklyn Philharmonic and the Compania Tridente of Granada performed Falla's opera at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Three singers joined the orchestra in the pit: Baritone Chris Pedro Trakas sang Don Quixote, tenor Martin Vasquez sang Puppet Master Peter, and soprano Awet Andemicael sang the part of "the boy," who narrates the puppet show, in a rapid barrage of excitement. On stage, brightly dressed, life-sized puppets attracted the lights, rendering the black-clad puppeteers virtually invisible.

Shadow and stick puppets, a graphically bold set, and evocative music combined to create a sophisticated miniature universe for the "puppet-show within a puppet-show." Imprisoned in a tower, Melisendra, a lonely shadow puppet, dreamed of her husband while a violin played sadly. At one point a Moor crept up and stole a kiss as a shrill piccolo screamed. In another scene, a zigzagged prop piece cast a shadow upon a gold triangle to create a long and winding road.

When Don Gayferos rescued his wife, the Moors careened after the couple on horseback, accompanied by fierce, charged orchestral strains. Enrapt in the frenzy, Don Quixote's reality blurred. In one brazen act, he wielded his sword and attacked. A single slice of a rope exposed the underside of Master Peter's puppet show. No heads flew this time, but Don Gayferos and Melisendra did get away.

Artistic excellence? ****
Was it entertaining? ****
Was it inventive? ***
Was it healing? ***

(Updated on 4/26/04)

Unlike Kurosawa's films, The Twilight Samurai is not a big-budget film filled with showy samurai action spectacles or sword fighting. Instead, the film focuses on the universal question, "What is real happiness for human beings?" as it portrays the rather ordinary life of a low-ranking samurai, a life with which today's audience can empathize. The director, Yoji Yamada, is well known for depicting ordinary people, struggling with duty or suppressed love, from a tender point of view, and his latest film broadens the audience's horizons by presenting a simple existence as desirable compared to a more conventional, materialistic life.

The Shogun era is giving way to the Meiji Restoration, and Seibei Iguchi (Hiroyuki Sanada, who also appeared in The Last Samurai) is a low-ranking samurai from a small clan in Shonai, Japan. After his wife dies of tuberculosis, he lives with his two young daughters and elderly, increasingly senile mother. The family is very poor. Seibei's income is low, and they are saddled with debts left over from his wife's medication and funeral expenses, so all the family members must work hard, harvesting their own food in the fields and doing odd jobs. After work, Seibei, in his poor, worn clothes, always hurries home, refusing to drink with his fellow samurai, who teasingly call him "Tasogare Seibei (Twilight Seibei)." One day, Seibei encounters a childhood friend, Tomoe (Rie Miyazawa), who has just divorced her drunken husband. When the ex-husband challenges Seibei with a sword, the samurai casually defeats him using only a wooden stick. Before long the news of Seibei's easy victory is all over the clan. It's obvious that Seibei and beautiful Tomoe love each other, but Seibei turns down a marriage proposal from Tomoe's family, believing that he is too poor to marry her. Before long, he is caught up in the shifting turmoil of the era and is assigned by his superiors to kill a renowned warrior on the wrong side of the clan's power struggle. Being a samurai, he is not allowed to refuse the order. But before setting out for the confrontation, he makes up his mind about one thing....

Secure in their father's love, Seibei's two little daughters study hard, help around the house, and grow up healthily and cheerfully. At the beginning of the film, one of the daughters asks Seibei, “Why do we study?” He responds by telling her his guiding principle, and at the same time encapsulating the message of the film: “Even though times may change, you can live without hesitation or anxiety if you have your own philosophy.” In an era of violent transition, he teaches her that her principles will guide her even when everything people have believed and relied on is turned upside down. Even when going through hardships, Seibei finds happiness in being thoughtful of others, in working hard, and in seeing his daughters' growth. This film should be an eye-opener for those who, in this stressful and materialistic world, feel they must compete to be a “winner” to find happiness.

The climax of the film comes in the duel scene between Seibei and Zen-uemon Yogo, another sword master, played by the world-famous Butoh dancer Min Tanaka. Tanaka's performance as a madman in despair is so superb that it's hard to believe this is his screen debut. Especially for those audience members who are used to seeing TV or film actors, his fresh approach to acting is innovative and powerful. Very few actors in Japan have such a dominating presence.

Throughout the film, natural light is used to create a feeling of realism. (Thus, it is rather hard to see what is going on inside the houses.) In the duel scene, almost no lighting is used, and we see only silhouettes of the characters moving in darkness. It makes the scene extremely intense and thrilling, increasing our fear of death.

The Twilight Samurai won most of the major awards in Japan's Academy Awards in 2002 and became the first Japanese film in 22 years to be nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Award at the 76th Academy Awards. Unfortunately The Twilight Samurai didn't win the Oscar, but its message of family values and true happiness will stay in our hearts, beyond differences of era and culture.

Artistic excellence? ***
Was it entertaining? **
Was it inventive? **
Was it healing? ****

(Updated on 4/26/04)

Photo: Carol Rosegg

Tibet is a problematic place. In the political sphere, almost everyone knows of the flight of the Dalai Lama and the sufferings of religious Tibetans after the invasion of the Chinese. Not as many people know of the Chinese decimation of the Tibetan peasantry by starvation, appropriation of their farms, and forced labor. Fewer still know that, in the idyllic days before 1959, when the Dalai Lama was free in his homeland, he and the monasteries had vast land holdings complete with serfs who were definitely not free. In the religious sphere, Tibetan Buddhism is different from other forms of Buddhism, with its sexual aspect, Tantric Buddhism, and the beautiful and terrifying pictures of the demons awaiting us after death if we do not adhere to the proper actions prescribed in The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

“Kwatz!” is a ritual sound made by the student of Tibetan Buddhism to signify a sort of awakening, and in this play, author Ernest Abuba has brought together shards of a man’s life floating before him as he lies on an operating table after being attacked with a hammer. The problem is not the nonlinear form so much as that we never really know who the central character is. We see his cruelty to his dog, or his discontented wife, but we understand nothing about him. Alongside snatches of this unhappy man’s life, we see snatches of Chinese cruelty to the Tibetans, or people going mad as they starve to death in prison. These are strong and true moments, imaginatively directed by Tisa Chang, but the throughline between them is lacking. Mr. Abuba says the theme of the play is that we should learn to embrace life as a truthful metaphor. This reviewer needed more focus and more clarity in order to embrace anything. Life may be snatches of a dream, but a play, as an act of communication, needs to extend itself so that its audience can understand what is to be understood.

(Updated on 8/11/04)