Lessons in Innovation From the School of Hard Knocks

Sometimes, dancers and musicians take the same stage and try to interact--dancers free-flowing, musicians doing cramped little minuets with their instruments--and the twain just never meet. But the New York-based music/dance/theater collective Yoshiko Chuma and the School of Hard Knocks shakes it up and emerges with an inventive, kinetic blend. It’s a little like a string quartet that has taken workshops with the Marx Brothers and spread the word.

The company has its seriously lyrical moments, too, lush and exactingly rendered; most of its 11 members (from Crash Orchestra and the Tokyo-based Aska Strings Project) are classically trained. Making its West Coast premiere Saturday at the Japan America Theatre with “Unfinished Symphony,” the troupe is directed by Chuma, a performance artist.

The 90-minute piece easily flows or jerks into small scenes, musical soliloquies, skirmishes and games, with the pace and the focus always changing and bits of irony and whimsy emerging. Musicians get the widest stretch; in white funky formal wear, they hop onto chairs, tango with the piano, get ceremonially separated from an instrument and rejoined in inventive ways--always finding new colors and qualities in their playing, sometimes singing and almost always moving.

Bits of Mozart, Gershwin, Chopin and other musical styles fly by, but the three dancers tend to stay in one mode, a kind of floppy, reckless modern dancing. That part of the symphony is more underdeveloped than unfinished. Still, the piece is bracing overall--new territory, new moves and, contrary to the company name, not a hard knock in sight.