On its third visit here, founding butoh master Akaji Maro’s Dairakudan (“Big Camel Ship) dance troupe already has enough of a following that the Vancouver International Dance Festival (VIDF) is hawking memorabilia in the Playhouse lobby as the audience files in.
Hottest selling item is a gorgeous poster emblazoned (in kanji ideograms) with the title of tonight’s performance: 擬人超人 – common terms of art, as it turns out, in the Sci-Fi subgenre of Japanese manga comic books.
In English, according to the VIDF programme, the phrase translates as “Pseudo human/Super human.” But that misses a crucial nuance of the first two characters, which carry a connotation of “wannabe” human.
And it’s that undertone of aspirational one-upmanship that seems to drive much of the horror and drollery of Maro’s dystopian three-way tryst between techno-lords, their cyborg creations (or usurpers) and the great, redundantly recyclable “wetware” residue of the rest of us.
Under the kanji the posters feature a montage of bodies, nearly naked and blanched white, as per butoh convention, crowded as densely as a termite hill. So, filing into the hall, it comes as a surprise when the houselights dim and the scene opens on no humanoid figures at all, but rather KUMA-Katsuyuki Sinohara’s static, inanimate (?) three-storey floor-to-ceiling sculpture.
It’s a light-transmitting glass column that frays at the top into a tangle of twisted tentacles like a plasma discharge orb. Arrayed upstage, an arc of upended glass coffins casts glinting reflections throughout the auditorium.
When the spots finally do pick out a row of dancers, they seem as silicon-based as the glassy stage set itself: seated ‘droids that twitch and jerk, systematically testing out the flexion of each joint and facial tic. These, we will learn, are the earliest Beta prototypes of a robotic ecosystem tended by a platoon of fawning lab-coated techies on the payroll of a top-hatted Mister Monopoly capitalist.
With growls and barks and mudras, a more-or-less Shinto priest sanctifies this world-order so that the Moneybags can complacently imagine he’s still in control. The mogul is soon disabused, though. Over the course of the next 16 scenes, the fast-evolving cyborgs repeatedly glitch and even mutiny, all to the tune of a variegated, pulsing, resonant techno score by “Wizard” DJ Jeff Mills and shakohachi master Keisuke Doi.
As soon as they find their feet, the robots stomp the stage demandingly in a stiff golem hoedown. To feed them, a platoon of slinking ghouls have to scavenge floppy “wetware” manikin/corpses into (very fetching, Japonesey) wooden kegs. Early efforts to program the ‘bots fall prey to viral glitches.
So, as a Plan B, Mister Monopoly – shadowed by a slouching Igor-style acolyte – cobbles together a Frankenstein pastiche of a superman. The ghouls drag out the thethered monster in leg irons, but he flails his chains to entangle his captors into a staggering maypole dance.
Then Mora himself, Dairakudakan’s 76 year-old founder, puts in a cameo appearance. He gets rolled out onstage in a wooden barrel, rising from his cask in a cadaverous frizz of scraggly locks. “Igor” baits this apparition and corks the ghost back into its tub.
In its quest for wetware inputs, Robotics, Inc., sets out to farm them in the form of whelk-like little hoop creatures. These mindless, barrel-dwelling bleaters are, in turn, hybridized with the upgraded ‘bots to create a new line of multi-limbed chimeras.
Boss-chimera of them all is a kind of concertmaster robot with a gleaming pair of elongated prosthetic arms, who conducts the cyborg ensemble from a command-throne upstage. The whole tableau meshes smoothly enough at first, but then the robots revolt, yanking the arms off the conductor’s limp and bleeding corpse as the techies cower in fear.
Firebird in the dendrite forest. Photo: Hiroyuki Kawashima
The white coats rally, though, when the rebels meekly surrender the severed prosthetics. Surpassingly intelligent though they may be, the automata are not yet conscious enough to aspire to the controller’s throne.
So the techies set out to repair the wreckage of the uprising, using white-light laser “oilcans” to heal the broken joints and bloody stumps. They even concoct a new pièce de résistance: a kind of blanched Barbie glamour ‘bot with the shag hair bob, perky tunic and provocative pout of a manga gamine.
When all is patched up, Mr. Moneybags – trailed by his Frankenstein and Igor, to the grunts and moans of his attendant priest – passes among his mechanical legions, anointing all with some bright pink bionic Joy Juice. The robots celebrate their resurrection with cyber-kungfu jousts to the incongruous strains of composer Doi’s lilting waltz as performed on a Japanese samisen.
The growling priest presides over this ‘droid dojo as umpire, coach and cheerleader. But, after a few hyper-ceremonious rounds, his yips and barks can no longer goad the combatants to compete. For that, it seems, they’d need a little more autonomous spunk, what the program note scenario refers to as a “Soul Injection.”
Or, in cyber-speak, “The Singularity,” the much-anticipated (or dreaded) turning point when Artificial Intelligences attain not only self-awareness but some sort of unimaginable hyper-consciousness, the ultimate unleashing of the Ghost in the Machine.
Specifically, butoh-master Maro in his Ghost garb. But this time, he reappears onstage not as a wispy, barrel-bound spectre, but rather as a queenly hag blowing kisses from a parade float. It’s dragged by virtually the entire 20-member cast, with Frankenstein on the lead rope, Moneybags as footman and ghouls bound to the chariot wheels as Barbie, Igor and the Priest caper behind.
For this finale, drag queen Maro trades in grave clothes for a white taffeta wedding gown and hair teased up into a bouffant fright-wig. With “skin was as white as leprosy/ The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she, Who thicks man's blood with cold,” especially when she steps down from her rolling Juggernaut to taunt us with a hideous cakewalk of palsied bumps and grinds. Maro, Barbie and Igor vie to take over the conductor's throne, but then decide to punt and pose for cheesy threesome selfies instead.
But all that Coleridge and Rath Yatra reference is just the happenstance clutter of my own spooky mind. Dairakudakan threads its mycelia into the far deeper, darker, richer compost of Japan’s own trove of uncanny lore and imagery. The result is a spectacle as intellectually challenging as it is aesthetically dazzling and slyly funny. It’s a testament to the artists’ inventiveness, rigour, coordination and skill that they can tap their ancient, culturally specific archetypes to engage a Western audience on issues of urgent contemporary relevance.