Poised on the Sharp Edge Between East and West

Down in the Kennedy Center's Hall of States on Thursday night, a robot in a kimono was astonishing passers-by with her creepily human looks and gestures. Up in the Terrace Theater, a Japanese dance troupe named Noism 08 impressed its audience with how creepily robotic its dancers appeared.

The contrast between life and its idealized representation, and between submission and control, hit hard in the inaugural dance performance of the center's two-week-long Japan festival. This 90-minute work had an awkward name -- "Nina -- Materialize Sacrifice" -- but a surprisingly elegant physical aspect, as female dancers in flesh-colored leotards were lifted, spun and handled by their male counterparts in myriad ways, all the while maintaining the stiff, unbending form of mannequins.

This dancer-as-dummy look went well beyond the arch wind-up-toy depictions in, say, "The Nutcracker." Here was an utterly perfect obliteration of human signifiers. There was no flinch of muscle, no shadow of breathing beneath those well-defined ribcages. Nearly nude, the dancers exposed all of themselves, and revealed nothing. I've never seen anything like it.

It was the ultimate in minimalism. It was an impressively complete sublimation to an artistic goal. It was also weird, disturbing and laden with sexual politics that might strike you as either simplistic or astute, depending on your level of feminism. The suit-wearing men who manipulated the inert women were gruff, proprietary. One man stooped to slip a hand beneath one woman's head as she lay on the stage; he set her upright in one easy motion, as if she weighed nothing, was nothing. But there's a sudden shift in the power dynamic: After a tense tango ends and the man turns to walk away, the woman shoots a hand out to grab the back of his collar. And things got quite a bit more interesting.

"Nina," whose final performance was last night, is the work of Jo Kanamori, the 33-year-old choreographer who heads Noism 08. Based in Niigata, the troupe is Japan's first city-funded dance company. Kanamori, in a brief interview, said that his dancers are paid a yearly salary -- unique among Japan's dance troupes. This was a condition of starting up his experimental enterprise, but that's not the only reason Kanamori is a deeply interesting artist.

He trained with the late French choreographer Maurice B¿jart, famed for a dramatic ballet style; he also performed with Netherlands Dance Theater II and the Lyon Opera Ballet. On paper, that looks like a recipe for impenetrably pseudo-profound Euro-torture. But I'd say Kanamori's great gift is he's found a way to make the dark, tense stuff of so much European-style modern dance more palatable. He does this with a quiet but emotionally potent aesthetic that feels distinctly Asian.

What betrays the continental influence: The darkened stage. The blackouts after each scene. The percussive, industrial score.

What we might refer to as Asian: The exquisite simplicity. The sense in "Nina's" very best scenes that there is nothing to add, nothing to subtract. Silence is there as much as sound; stillness as much as movement.

The hard, expressionless demeanor of the 10 dancers, and the equally icy thrust of the dancing -- once the women started giving back to the men as good as they got -- brought to mind the confrontational, acid-dipped ballet style of William Forsythe, the expat beloved across the pond. On these dancers' simply extraordinary bodies, however, there were softer edges as well as refined lines.

Kanamori's vision weakens here and there in this recently reworked piece, particularly in the ending. It felt like the end when the still life that had opened the work was echoed, though now with the men nearly naked on the ground, overseen by women in suits. Then came another section of strictly ordered exertions, much like others before it. Was this the ideal -- men and women as equals, only possible if they follow a strict format? The surgical clarity that had drawn us in grew muddled. Still, one was struck by its more lucid moments, and by the ambitious aims of a promising new voice.