BWW Reviews: THERE AND HERE Moves at Schimmel Center

She awoke, as in the womb, floating through a numinous, fluid-suffused air. As to thread the very fabric of reality, musician and composer Hideki Kato synthesized textural sonar frequencies.

The lighting dim, a single dancer gravitated upwards, as a body submerged. There and Here drew the audience in ever so coolly under the masterful eye of choreographer Takehiro Ueyama, also one of eleven dancers performing.

As Kato intoned the drum kit to a medley of synthesizers, elements of Tokyo noise music intermingled with the Japanese-inspired movements in "Take" Ueyama's stunning artistic direction.

Loosely based on the philosophies most popularly likened to Tibetan Buddhism, namely, the inter-being state of "bardo" (a kind of non-Western purgatory), There and Here instilled a neo-spiritual "Liberation Through Movement".

(The Tibetan Book of the Dead, literally "Bardo Thodol" for example, a guide for the dead through the "bardo" state, is translated as "Liberation through Hearing in the Intermediate State".)

The dancers animated bodily movements to the very extent of muscular potential, at once chaotic and uninhibited, then absolutely at peace. Finally, the soulful narrative led the audience on to imagine how universal truths are also true in the beyond.

As the dancers merged, the wisdom of bodily extinction and individuality became united. As on earth, so in death, and throughout the bardo state in between, togetherness incites independence, freedom, and the embodiment of all that is beautiful.

Or, could it be, that we are in the bardo state already, now?

Photo credit: Phil Echo

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