Struggle shown with conformity

Leaving last Thursday night's performance by the Buto-Sha Tenekei dance troop at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center, a middle-aged man sighed to his wife, "There was no joy in that."

He was right. Thursday night's performance was a study in pain without passion or ecstasy. The four-member company's hour and a-half performance featured brilliant interpretations of struggle, isolation and hysteria, but nothing even approaching joy cro ssed choreographer Ebisu Torii's stage.

Opening with a seemingly interminable segment in which a lone performer battles, apparently without hope, against the morass from which she is born, much of the program suggested the Japanese artist's struggle with a culture rooted in conformity.

This impression was confirmed in the next segment in which a dancer whose identity is obscured by a great Japanese flag prances unrestrained to a driving mambo rhythm. The message seems clear - freedom of expression and passion often come to Japan only from without.

Due to its intensity, much of the performance was difficult to watch. Audience attrition was high at some of the evening's more trying moments. The Buto-Sha dancers have developed the use of tedium as an pigment for their visual/emotional palate, and emp loy it as Stravinsky did dissonant chords. It is a powerful tool. Its use, however, was obviously not to everyone's taste.

The evening ended in a wrenching crescendo, in which order is achieved only to at once break down into a brilliant juxtaposition of hysteria and hillaria -- around a contorting central figure, two dancers roll on the stage, lost in what the audience may either interpret as sobs or mad laughter.

The tension built throughout so much of the performance crests and breaks with this finale. Instead of a cathartic release, however, the audience is left with the plummeting impression that all of the struggle that had gone before, all of the pain endure d, had been for nothing.