CREATIVITY seemed to leap forth and take flight from the depths of the imagination to the wooden stage in The Dead Bird, with its potent and moving mix of butoh and contemporary dance.
The various performers — Foo Chiwei, Lee Choy Wan, Lee Ren Xin and Boyz Chew — brought supple and controlled athletic energy to a narrative that revolved around birds, as well as the essence of humanity, death and rebirth.
Interestingly, the assortment of movements felt like they came from within the performers rather than a set masterlist, so the viewer was naturally drawn into the individual and collective visceral responses in The Dead Bird.
It was relatively clear: The tree of life, the birds that roosted in it and the eventual act of finding their own form. Playful at times, it was also contrastingly tortured at other moments.
The allegorical finding of a mind, in Chew's eagle persona, felt like an expression of self-awareness with a suffocating feel for ideas, from the inside and out.
There was also some mad kineticism from Lee Choy Wan and Lee Ren Xin. A gamut of expressions, especially from Ren Xin, dancing the ringdove, brought forth a symbol of purity that seemed to meet her alter-ego and desire in The Lady and the Red Shoe.
Sharp movements came from Foo, who danced the character of the crow and was seemingly a receptacle of secrets perhaps in a segment called The Old Man and the Dress.
Yeow, as the tree, was seen contorted in a stretchable red cloth and offered the bluebird of rebirth, which tasted her first drop of rainwater. Finally, a release came in a dervish whirling sequence, that signified a new dawn, and, with that, a new realisation in this life.
It's was not about a simple flowing tale, but much closer to a series of connected vignettes. Each performer had their own dance style but the bird-like movements were dynamically evocative, nonetheless, while the chatterings were piquant.
A black cloth backdrop allowed the performers to move in and out of the "shadows". A fishing net-like tent on one side of the stage completed the set. For one surprising scene, a roll of paper cascaded down when pulled by a performer.
The costumes put together by Victor Khoo certainly lent gravitas to The Dead Bird, from primitive rags to white togas and then red and white wide skirts for the dervish sequence.
Adding to the effect atmospherically was the throbbing electronic dance music soundscape that was at times a bit on the loud side. But this seemed to guide the emotions from both the audience members and those on stage to organically meet the sensitive narrative being performed by dance.
With The Dead Bird, Yeow, founder of Soubi Sha, provided an interesting dimension to butoh, a post-WWII dance form that many traditionally associate with certain aesthetic markers, such as the chalk-white bodies, bald heads and slow intense movements that can unsuspectingly come across as grotesque or plain weird.
I think Yeow, whose mentor was the late butoh master, Yukio Waguri, offered a Malaysian version of this artform, dancing true to the local culture, in a cosmopolitan adaptation of sorts.
The dervish segment also makes sense, since it is part and parcel of Sufism, as her inspirational text come from Ibn Arabi's The Universal Tree And the Four Birds, a Sufism practitioner and poet (1165-1240).
The Dead Bird was more an imagistic work, rather than being just a linear narrative piece. Without being tied down to a set of movements, butoh is certainly more than capable of evolving to suit local tastes.
I could have sat through more of The Dead Bird, a two-night only show at Pentas 2 of the Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre.
The curtain may have fallen for the show’s run here, but The Dead Bird felt more like a continuing journey than a last stop. More like a comma, than a full stop.
Like the bird on a branch that flies away, I get it now when butoh is seen performed in a park – it is an ongoing conversation.