Ghosts - a terrible & beautiful meditation

All cultures, it's safe to say, tell ghost stories. Whether Japanese yurei, Irish banshee, or German poltergeist, the restless dead are pitied and feared. Whether haunting locations or specific people, phantoms remind us that repressed history and long-past tragedy may still be echoing around our political, social, or psychic present. They also signify that human beings are fascinated by the things we find the most terrifying.

Butoh - literally: stamping dance - is a performance art that originated in post-WWII Japan. Iconoclastic, meditative, melancholy and grotesque, the first butoh piece premiered in 1959. It explored the then-taboo subject of homosexuality and featured a live chicken.

Since then, dancers have employed the form to push boundaries and achieve transformation. Kokoro Dance's site-specific production of Ghosts does both. But it's not for the faint of heart - either for dancer or audience member.

Let me set the scene for Ghosts, a performance choreographed by Kokoro Dance and a 10 for 20 Dancing on the Edge Commission. It's seven p.m. on a Saturday night and it's been raining sporadically all day. Water pools on the tarmac of the parking lot on the roof of the Sunrise Market at the corner of Powell and Gore. It reflects pockets of the enormous, colour-rich community mural on the east wall; the white castle-like spires of St. James' Anglican Church; the nervous faces of the audience that ring the space; and the 12 poised 'ghosts', three kilted pipers and a drummer. An ambulance wails by on the street below. The drummer strikes. The lament begins.

By chance, I'm facing the dance company's artistic directors and choreographers Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi. Eerily, their eyes focus inward. At a distance of three feet, I see how Kokoro's signature white body make-up exaggerates Hirabyashi's body hair and the empty piercings in Bourget's earlobes. Then, Bourget begins convulsing. She snarls and her teeth are yellow. Her eyes roll back in her head - a stylised butoh expression. And one by one the other ghosts - both metaphoric and actual - wake and walk.

If you have never seen butoh, which mixes staccato - often flailing - movements with the breath-slow postures of martial arts, it can be difficult to envision a performance. And it might also be virtually impossible to imagine that an art form, which seems so conventionally hideous, can be a meditation. Yet, as a meditator and sometime martial artist, that's my belief.

Along with Kokoro's dancers march the lingering and unquiet spirits of the Powell Street neighbourhood's troubled past and present: the early 1900s anti-Asian riots, the 1941 deportation of Japanese Canadians via an office next door to the Sunrise Market, the poverty of skid row, and the desolation of heroine addiction.

In many Asian societies, white is the colour of purity and is worn by the dead at funerals. In Western societies, it is favoured by brides. Costume designer Laura Bartlett, seizing upon this juxtaposition, clothes the dancers in deconstructed wedding gowns, tulle and beaded veils. The effect is brilliantly macabre.

The brides quarrel, threaten, and lay themselves down to rest. They roll and crawl through the puddles and emerge with soaked hair, and gritty rivulets tracing down white arms. Ghosts puddle jump with childlike frenzy. And beaded wedding veils snap against the tarmac. It is horribly beautiful.

Yet, when a diminutive brunette freezes a yard away and begins to savagely slap her hands together in front of her lovely, otherworldly face, I am frankly terrified. For a few moments, I literally feel that she has transformed into an onryo, a vengeance-seeking apparition, and I can't look away.

Then, the most miraculous thing happens. With a hand gesture that recasts faces into the masks of a Greek chorus, the ghosts appear to find first themselves, and then a partner whose face they frame and search for recognition and understanding.

Later, when the group coalesces into a single unit that trails its ruined finery in a crippled bridal march, it seems that all the disparate souls have found communion and some ease.

And the work of heart, soul and spirit - or kokoro - is done. For now.

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Ghosts (Kokoro Dance) is a 10 for 20 Dancing on the Edge Commission presented at the Dancing on the Edge 20th Anniversary Festival

Composer:
Sylvia DeTar

Performers:
Brandy Baybutt
Barbara Bourget
Carolyn Chan
Jay Hirabayashi
Holly Holt
Ellen Luchkow
Molly McDermottt
Espirito Santo Mauricio
Kristine Richmond
Robert Seaton
Cara Siu
Amy Tao

Musicians:
James Laughlin
Neil MacPherson
Will Nichols
Sylvia DeTar

Costumes:
Laura Bartlett