Beyond the Metaphor of Mirrors

Kagemi (kage=shadow, mi=seeing and being seen)

It's morning, and I'm riding the slow bus uptown. As I glance out the window, I see two women amble arm in arm, strolling in rhythmic sync with one another. Two adults and an older child hurry to the corner with the same urgent swing of the arm and tightly held hips. A man and woman sit across from one another in a coffee shop, each focusing on the other, both heads titling to one side. A beautiful young woman in tight, low cut jeans lies seductively across the side of a bus, urging me to dress like her. Everywhere I look, I see people reflecting one another. Last night's performance of Sankai Juku's Kagemi: Beyond the Metaphor of Mirrors functions like a pair of polarized sunglasses, filtering out the glaring rays of my needs and desires, allowing me to perceive the reflective shadows of shape and pattern in the world around me with a clarity previously unavailable.

What does lie beyond the metaphor of mirrors?

The stage is covered with gigantic lotus flowers hovering a few feet off the ground, as if floating in pond. Their delicate stems curve gently as they dangle in the air, creating the illusion of subtle, undulating motion. Below the surface, just barely visible, dancers lie among the stems—sleeping, unconscious, unborn. As Kagemi begins, the flowers slowly ascend to reveal these nascent forms, which appear to emerge, like our primordial ancestors, from the depths of the water.

A singular figure of a man stands in a pool of light. He is settled into his body, at home in his physical presence in a way that conveys age, experience, and wisdom. He moves at an exquisitely slow pace, a tempo necessitated by the extraordinarily deliberate quality of his movements. Each gesture arises from a source deep within, as though emanating from the Earth itself, and resonating throughout his body. The movement is abstract but laden with meaning, at once mysterious and profound. A finger bends, worlds shift. Movements transform seamlessly from one into the next, each moment of equal or greater significance than the moment before. The dancer appears to perceive each impulse as he experiences it, spiraling simultaneously inward and out between intrinsic truth and authentic expression, internal and external realities becoming one.

In Eastern religions, the lotus represents purity, divine wisdom, and the individual's progress from the lowest to the highest consciousness. In Kagemi, this genesis begins as dancers squat and bound in unison with one another in a primitive quality that evokes the mimicry of monkeys and evolutionary origins. The dancers are divided into two factions that never interact, except through adversarial gestures of attack and retreat, always moving in tribalistic uniformity. Three dancers, now upright, turn to face one another for the first time, discovering themselves in each another as they move together as one. Two dancers stand on either side of the stage. In perfect mirror image they dip a toe onto the raised square floor of the stage set, as if into a pool of water. They peer searchingly into images of themselves reflected in the water below and in one another. I am reminded of a photograph of a person holding a photograph of himself holding a photograph that continues on into infinity, but goes nowhere. These unformed characters exist only in their reflection of one another. There is a sense of innocence and communion, but no core self and no individual identity. Is this an evolutionary stage in the psychology of man, an ontogenetic recapitulation of human spiritual development?

This unfolding of consciousness is marked by the carefully designed costumes of Kagemi. Initially, dancers in white body makeup and bare chests are costumed in pure white loincloths, then long flowing skirts. As the dance progresses, the dancers' bodies and movements are increasingly obscured by their costumes, as if marking a progressive loss of innocence. Four...