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Hands searching their way Dance theatre "Dancing Between" with Minako Seki in the Darmstadt Hoffart-Theatre

By Boris

DARMSTADT. In Search of ourselves we always move between two poles. In between these poles lie the facets of our being. In her piece "Dancing Between", which the Japanese Butoh dancer Minako Seki showed at the Hoffart-Theatre on Sunday night, she most intensely draws from all the possibilities this intermediate space leaves for movement and expression. A dim ray of light falls on the stage wrapped in darkness. Out of the nowhere appears a jerking shape. While the eyes of the observer try to distinguish human features in this being, the brain wants to understand, what the eye perceives or believes to perceive. Even when the light starts to illuminate the stage and electronic sounds intensify the pulsating movements of the dancer, the visual image still seems unreal. Only the two chairs on stage are able to anchor the eye. Then the wiry figure in silver costumes sits down on one of the chairs. Two hands search their way over the body's back. They don't seem to belong to Minako Seki's body. The hectic rustling of the cloth, the rattling of the chair, on which the dancer tries to defend herself against these hands, all this creates a tension in the audience that can hardly be avoided.

Butoh, in spite of its mostly minimal, abstract movements, turns out to be a dance of powerful intensity. Once more music breaks into the brief silence and urges Minako Seki to move between the two chairs. As if pulled and pushed by invisible forces, she keeps running in opposite directions. Like in a film that is shown in fast motion, she speeds up her repetitive movement patterns till she turns into a jerking bundle - right before the explosion. But there is method behind the apparent chaos. In command of her body, the dancer can constantly change the miming of her face or let her whole body tremble and shake. The musical spheres of sound open wide spaces for interpretation during the one hour performance. Impressive sequences whisk by like flashlights, and a mere wink of the eye can totally change the atmosphere.

Minako Seki is never definite, and yet clear when she tells about her own fears and those determined by others, about listening and obeying, about desire and constraint - and about the respective intermediate spaces and pending states which the title "Dancing Between" suggests. That's exactly where Minako Seki leaves her audience: in suspension between delight and confusion, in the indecisiveness of being.
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