Blood Cherries (review)

Dawn Akemi Saito's latest solo work Blood Cherries consists of many parts that lead the audience to an emotional, moving whole. Part memoir and part fantasy, Blood Cherries is a piece that swiftly traverses the past with the present, following the journey of a young woman through the painful aftermath of her father's death. Saito performs her story using a variety of sensory texts and movements that include Butoh dance, jazz, naturalistic sounds, abstract slide images, spoken word, and monologue. This variegated approach is fitting given Blood Cherries' primary thematic focus, which centers on the complicated burden of representing a person's entire life. The end result is a piece that is both dislocating and cathartic; one confronts the pain of loss and deals with the often more difficult process of "continuing on."

The set for Blood Cherries at Dance Theater Workshop is stark and simple. A small end table is placed upstage, upon which a glass vase filled with cherry blossoms sits. A large red book, a bronze bowl, and a vodka bottle filled with salt are placed downstage, on the opposite corner, creating a diagonally-configured performance space. Blood Cherries takes place in several locations geographically and temporally; the audience is transported from French cafés and the forests of the Ardennes into a psychedelic jazz session in the 1960s USA. World War II-era Japan, hospitals, and temples, and the shifts from one space to another are startlingly seamless as a result of the music and sound that at times overwhelm the audience. David Van Tieghem's sound design perfectly matches the jarring rhythm of the piece, which is a blend of naturalistic sounds of the outdoors (e.g. rain, horses, and birds), jazz instrumentals, and abstracted sounds. Such auditory moments provide a complimentary texture to Blood Cherries.

The playbegins and ends with a ritualized Japanese funeral, and this frame is constantly referenced throughout the piece. The image of the funeral—and the traditions associated with the task of memorializing the dead—accretes meaning as the piece progresses. Blood Cherries can be read as a theatrical memorializing of the father, for it is his story (along with his daughter's) that is revealed through the course of the narrative. The father haunts the story literally and figuratively—he is constantly present in the narrative structure of the piece. After all, his death prompts the protagonist on a voyage into her own familial past as the second-generation daughter of Japanese immigrants. The protagonist time-travels through her father's past, which includes his time spent as a trained Japanese soldier during the Second World War through to his experience as an anti-war activist during the 1960s. Yet, she returns to the moment in which the piece begins—at the time of her father's death—which is a constant reminder that the work is a contemplation of the multifaceted, contradictory nature of a person's life.

Often, both father and daughter simultaneously share the stage. In one memorable scene, Saito shifts from the persona of the daughter to the character of the father in a Cha-Cha dance number, which allows her to transform, with each series of steps, from one character to the other. Such confrontations between father and daughter are episodes of precise movement in which reality mixes with dream. In this particular moment, the physical and surreal aspects of the father's death are revealed through monologue and movement. The Cha-Cha becomes increasingly feverish in pace; this uncontrolled sense is heightened by the protagonist's revelation that her father's body is crumbling with each shake of the hips and step of the toes; the dance begins to take on a surreal tone. The abstracted slides that provide an additional visual text emphasize the sense that this is a dream of sorts, in which one...