Oguri Sequel Courts Distant ‘Flame’

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, along comes butoh artist Oguri with a splashy full-evening sequel to “Drift,” his 1994 creation that used the Watercourt at California Plaza as a liquid environment for dreamlike, Neo-Expressionist movement spectacle.

“A Flame in the Distance,” commissioned by the plaza performance series as a site-specific collaboration, premiered Friday in and around two fountains at the outdoor downtown venue, enlisting Oguri and four members of his locally based company Renzoku, along with six musicians from Shane Cadman’s Illustrious Theatre Orchestra.

Part 1 found Oguri and Renzoku wearing white and crouched atop a low fountain-sculpture near Grand Avenue--a concrete sunburst made up of five stacked concentric discs pierced by lights and waterspouts. As water streamed away from its center, everyone except Oguri slowly moved down the sides and out into the flat, dry surroundings, while Cadman’s moody score just as slowly expanded from a solo woodwind to a full sextet.

In a typically amazing demonstration of his mastery as a performer, Oguri made memorable drama from the tension between balance and imbalance, with every shift of weight or prolonged stretch becoming heightened into a metaphysical statement--the body as an independent living thing, feeling its way, always on alert for the next threat to survival.

*

Suddenly the computerized fountain began sending high jets of water onto Oguri’s circular platform, taking him into a new range of metaphor. Sometimes the water seemed to bombard him and he staggered grotesquely through the spouts like a shellshocked war casualty in the line of fire. At other moments, he seemed to be dancing inside a waterfall, protected by the torrent, gathering strength from it and definitely dangerous when wet.

To bridge the two parts of the program, Oguri and Renzoku danced through the arcade leading from the Grand Avenue fountain to the Watercourt, an area in which a wall of fountains sends cascades down a wide staircase to a large, shallow pool. This transitional sequence offered a final close-up look at Oguri and an instructive contrast between his fierce, second-by-second specificity as a performer versus the more generalized, pictorial effect of the others. Although they had mastered the excruciating, sustained crouch-walk that linked the two halves of the piece, Renzoku danced in a bland wash of feeling while Oguri made the act of merely spreading his fingers seem a momentous kinetic process.

As a result, his absence from most of Part 2 made this sequence largely belong to the excellent musicians, now relocated in a poolside gazebo. Incorporating electronic samples drawn from the fountain mechanisms, Cadman’s score expertly layered instrumental textures in a somber sonic landscape while Renzoku (wearing black) waded into the pool, drifting ever lower and farther out until you saw nothing but heads bobbing on the surface. Then, with Oguri rejoining them, everyone stamped through a brief, joyous coda on the steps of the waterfall-staircase, sending sprays of water shooting from under their feet.

At this point, a little girl in the audience wandered to the edge of the pool, obviously as tempted as everyone else to join the company. However, she prudently knelt to touch the water, and the coldness of it sent her scurrying back to her seat. Butoh baptism is obviously not for the faint of heart--even during a California heat wave.