KVT’s January Briefs: Derashinera – five plus star dance company

Thanks to the Japan Foundation KVT will contribute only one brief this week

Why bother with more when Derashinera is in town?

Not that we saw them dance the performances illustrated above – but what the company gave overflowing audiences last weekend was 5 star enough to whet my appetite for MORE MORE MORE!

The company of five dancers cum brilliant mime artists was accompanied by director / choreographer extraordinaire Shuji Onodera (pictured above) who, luckily for some dancers and mimes in Vietnam, is hanging around as an ambassador for a few weeks to instruct and enthuse.

The company uses theater actors and combines mime, dance into a theatrical dialogue that is breathtakingly unique. Apparently some of the company works have been inspired by workshops with deaf groups whose members had honed their other senses to new levels, and using techniques from butoh

Vietnamese audiences love mime and Derashinera’s conceptual combination of mime and dance won them over completely with the first piece, a high powered 23 minute work for 3 performers that was 1920/30-ies Mack Sennett farce complete with car chases, shootouts and a bowling alley interlude. At times fast and furious, at others in slow motion. Sleight of hand between the characters is a feature of the company and makes you blink with the dexterity used. Music was in fabulously in period.

In the end it was all a wishful thinking daydream on the part of one nerdy looking, though totally dynamic performer

If the first dance was Sennett, the second piece, a 45 minute absurdist dream, was Haruki Murikami surrealism.

Minimal, sometime multimedia props, everyday clothes, and without a storyline, the choreography and the performers, 3 males and two females and including the choreographer, are mesmerizing. Many of the sequences (a ballet for 5 with picture frames of diminishing sizes; a poetic interlude with a magic illuminated, doll house) sear into memory. Onodera describes the piece as a portrait of non-existence world. At its conclusion we realize that the work is about beauty. Of movement, of intellect.

Fabulous stuff!