FURO - Japanese Bath-Turned-Dance

In Israel, a Modern Dance Production Fuses East and West

by DANIELLA CHUDLER, special guest writer

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Cultures mesh as minds unite on the Tel Aviv Port in Israel for a multicultural modern dance production: Furo. Japan’s Ohad Naharim and Tabaimo both collaborated with Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company to create an original visual and audio spectacle.

The show offered a unique experience to all that attended. Approximately a four hour show, the producers’ intention was to create a show where the audience would not have to stay the entire time. Rather, the audience could come and go as they pleased—maybe watch the show for an hour, leave for a glass of wine at a nearby restaurant overlooking the Mediterranean Sea and eventually return for more dance entertainment. No matter how many times a person came and went, one could eventually see the entire show without actually missing anything new due to the repetition of the show.

Only two dancers would perform at one time. The Batsheva dancers began their set onstage and eventually moved to platforms on either side of the stage for the majority of their performance. At the end of their set, two more dancers would come on to repeat the exact same set of routines.

The stage replicates a furo, the word for the public Japanese baths. Yellow buckets sat on wooden floors. Three screens created the walls and played an original Japanese animation created by Tabaimo. The animation began with a boy walking into a furo. Eventually scenes of a man undressing and even unzipping his own skin appears. Following, sumo wrestlers entered the scene. They wrestled and in the midst of the action the wrestlers began to slow their movements and engaged in an affectionate kiss. Different depictions of the bath setting showed various people. One scene showed fully clothed men sitting in the bath when nude women climb over a wall and join them. Another scene shows a mother and her young daughter sitting alone in the water.

The short played several times over during the time a pair of dancers performed on stage. While the movie always stayed the same, the musical and dance accompaniment never repeated within the set. Watching the same scenes with different music and choreography helped create more meaning and room for interpretation for the audience.

Describing all the choreography in detail could be difficult for most people. Every aspect had a special element worthy of description. The dancers performed eclectic movements, executing the more unusual characteristics found in modern dance. For example, Naharim’s choreography called for the dancers to bite their own fists or stand with their mouths opened wide, tongues hanging out. The choreography varied from fast, convulsive movements to slow swaying stance. All matched to the music, which could sometimes be vulgor like Peaches’ lyrics “I’m only double A but I’m feeling triple X.” Standing on the sides of the stage and providing a crucial role in the description and understanding of the animation, the dancers almost acted like the chorus of an ancient Greek tragedy.

In one routine, danced after the scene where the sumo wrestlers began kissing and the furo filled with water, the dancers performed a particularly powerful piece. In unison, the dancers began the routine completely still with fingers on their eyes. Eventually, they stood held their hand in front of their face as though looking in a mirror slapping their faces and hiding from their reflection several times over. The choreography seemed to illustrate the disgust and fear that people often feel with themselves as they battle with acceptance and the idea of beauty with one’s self and others.

The same scene on the screen would be accompanied by soft melodies and steady, flowing movement. The set of routines ended with a scene where a man enters the furo and murders a woman inside. All the others die after an army tank drops barrels of gas into the furo.
Throughout the show, people laughed, gasped, made sounds of disgust, thought, and enjoyed.

The choreography comes to signify human experience. The choreography called for most of the movement to be done in unison. However, the dancers performed other parts as round—one dancer always three steps behind the other. Other parts had to be performed completely out of sync. Random interactions between the dancers could also be observed, such as short moments of maintaining eye contact or holding hands briefly. People perform the same movements day in and day out. Individuals come and go only to be followed by others. Only rarely do people realize that others share much of the same experiences as themselves.

The production can be interpreted as a microcosm of life. People of different sorts meet in a public commonplace, or furo. The people strip and who they are or what they look like no longer matters in the walls of the bath house. The furo becomes a safe house for individuals to be who they actually are, even homosexual sumo wrestlers. Occupations, appearances, and age no longer matter in the furo. People have common experiences that bring them together, whether or not they realize the similarities. The show conveys the idea that everybody has at least one common experience, ultimately death. The audience and the artists came and went throughout the show. However, even though sometimes only momentarily, they were united by the same destination: a pseudo-furo.

Furo is presented in a house built especially for the production.