Downtown Tucsonan - May 2008 - (Page 19)

Inside the Studio by Diane Daly Artist: the Quasi cum aluminum dance unit, or Qca Medium: dance, choreography and music Current Performance: Athena Trasha, May 8th & 9th, at ZUZI!, 738 N. 5th Ave. his month, tucsonans will have an opportunity to celebrate the uncommon. Quasi cum aluminum is the moniker under which Brandon Kodama choreographs three times per decade. on May 8th and 9th this peculiar “dance unity” will use gestures we rarely see to transport us to a place we would never visit: Japan’s suicide Forest. aokigahara Juukai, or the sea of trees, is a tourist hotspot for only one demographic. suicidal Japanese travel from all over Japan to reach the thick quiet forest, near Japan’s Mount Fuji, that was called “the perfect place to die” in wataru tsurumui’s The Complete Manual of Suicide. they move past wooden signs that read, “Please reconsider” and “Life is a precious present from your parents.” Many leave their shoes at the edge of the dark woods and continue along the damp forest floor in socked feet. then they hang nooses, or pour out handfuls of pills, and end their lives in the company of mossy caves that drip with icicles all year long. Qca’s current performance, Athena Trasha, transports the viewer to aokigahara through the movements of an eleven-member troupe with almost no professional—or even semi-professional—dancers. their bodies, gangly or a little bloated or flashing surprising curves, carry more unique characteristics (and more tattoos) than most troupe dancers’. But they all execute their movements without getting emotionally involved in them; even when all eleven dancers are wearing grotesque facial expressions, their energy is passive and detached. Kodama’s mantra for the dancers is, “this is a business,” and he describes the effect of his approach this way: “You know how with some dance performance, you know the dancers are watching themselves? well with this type of dance that’s not even remotely possible.” when he’s among them, thirty-four-year-old Kodama is the most understated presence in the group. He wears his hair very short and his clothes a little large. He has never studied dance formally. However, he has been choreographing Qca performances in tucson since the 1990s, and the cast of this fourth performance reflects the amount of respect local artists give him at this point. Athena Trasha includes performers from Flam chen, sugarbush, the Molehill orkestrah, and the Brambleberries, as well as other diversely talented, busy people. Kodama’s mostly original soundtrack, a work of art on its own, was engineered with the help of the university of arizona’s dan naiman. It includes recordings of Japanese rail stations, schmaltzy Enka (Japan’s equivalent of country music, very popular in karaoke performances), a not-unpleasant barrage of industrial noise, and a spare dose of Kodama’s own poetry, which tends toward haiku. T Kodama has lived in Japan on several occasions, and he resided for two years in Yamanashi Prefecture, where the suicide Forest is located. He and Molehill’s Mona chambers climbed Mount Fuji and visited aokigahara together, and that experience sparked the formation of Athena Trasha. He seems sincere as he tells me that the performance has existed as a whole in his mind for the last four years. “I’ve watched it several times. It’s changing all the time.” Kodama’s intention is for Qca to become “a conduit” of the energy in aokigahara Juukai, which is a complete presence in his mind, but getting it out and onto the stage is not easy. “You can’t get it whole. never. so you just grab pieces. I’m trying to translate it and not let it swallow me up.” Kodama began choreographing when he was twenty or twenty-one, after seeing a performance in Japan’s Butoh dance style by sankai Juku at centennial Hall. Butoh is usually recognized by the dancers’ glacial movements and white body paint. Enthusiasts say it is better defined as the removal of the dancers’ spiritual energy, through mental work like meditation, allowing audience energy to pour into the dance space instead. (audience members can laugh during Butoh performances, though skeptics may not laugh, or feel restless, as often as they expect.) Kodama hesitates to call Qca’s style Butoh, but he acknowledges Butoh as a major influence. the first Butoh performances were banned in Japan for their explorations of taboos like homosexuality, and Kodama has certainly embraced the concept of dance as a means of shedding light into the fissures of society, or in this case, disentangling one place, piece by piece, from the superstitions that cloak it. Back across the Pacific, the number of bodies found in aokigahara was rising when, early in the new millennium, the local population stopped sending out search parties. they didn’t want to find any more bodies, which were expensive to bury and which drew the attention of the press, leading to more suicides there. as a local police officer told a reporter in 2001, “we want people to forget about aokigahara for a while.” “It is enchanted, no doubt,” Kodama says of the suicide Forest. “But the idea of suicide in aokigahara is misconstrued as a pilgrimage.” In Japan, the cloak of tradition leads people to sentimentalize a suicide in aokigahara, disconnecting that death from its grisly nature. thousands of miles away, Brandon is convinced a group of gaijin will interpret the place more clearly. the distance can only illuminate. Quasi Cum Aluminum’s Athena Trasha will be performed on May 9th and 10th at 8pm at the ZUZI! Dance Space, 738 N. 5th Ave. at the Historic Y. Admission is $10. may.08. downtown tucsonan 19 http://www.providenceinstitute.com http://www.providenceinstitute.com

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Downtown Tucsonan - May 2008

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