THE NEW YORK TIMES

Dance Review/ Yoshiko Chuma
They Are the World
The choreographer Yoshiko Chuma takes on international relations in a work that has its world premiere this week. With 15 dancers and musicians telling the stories of people in Macedonia, Albania, Japan and the United States, and silent films projected overhead, “A Page Out of Order: M,” is “a layered, evocative depiction of nations struggling amid war,” raves Claudia La Rocco. Worth it no matter your politics.
Through Jan. 20. At 7:30 p.m., Dance Theater Workshop, 219 West 19th Street, Chelsea, (212) 924-0077; $15 and $25.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Dance Review | Yoshiko Chuma
You Watch This Art. You Should Also Watch Out.
By CLAUDIA LA ROCCO
January 19, 2007
When books or paintings become too dizzying, you can walk away until you're ready for more. But performance art keeps coming at you, ready or not. Though audience members can practice some form of pacing, much of the work's effect depends on the artist's skill in knowing how much is too much, or when too much is just enough.
In "A Page Out of Order: M," Yoshiko Chuma is constantly rearranging, layering and shifting to reveal another view - much like the movable cubes that are a staple of her choreography. Using black-and-white film, text, dance, singing and a marvelous onstage band, for 90 minutes she stirs an uneasy brew of war, identity and dislocation.
The vocalist Sizzle Ohtaka narrates, in Japanese, as text snippets of stories about failed relationships and ethnic strife flash onto screens. Then she sings mournfully over a recording of wind.
The wonderfully astute American dancer Christopher Williams crouches and stretches among the metal cube frames. The musicians dart here and there on their many instruments, evoking Latin jazz and conjuring old movie soundtracks or what sounds like Romanian gypsy music. Images of desolate landscapes come and go.
At moments the results are sophisticated, exhilarating and transformative in ways only half understood but strongly felt. At other times the chaos seems banal, a simple case of clutter; perhaps, you think, Ms. Chuma could play her cards a bit closer to her chest.
But then she is off in another direction, and you follow, ready or not.
"I could say we are moving from one system to the other," the Macedonian dancer Iskra Sukarova explains early on, though she is actually sitting quite still in her chair. "I'm moving, too. I'm not sure that I really like to move so much, though. It kind of makes me sick sometimes."
Ms. Sukarova, who functions as the performance's quiet heart, is referring to her country's political situation, both the tedium and upset that come with such upheaval. But, of course, she is also talking about art, how maddening it can be. The pages are out of order, you think. This is impossible. Then something clicks, and you never want the experience to end.

VILLAGE VOICE
Moving in the Shadows
Morris and Chuma each invite us to dance with invisible guests
by Deborah Jowitt
January 19th, 2007
“…The "m" in the title of Yoshiko Chuma's arresting A Page out of Order: M refers to Macedonia, one of three countries where Page, in varying versions, was performed in 2006. Images from the several cultures flash onto screens and erupt from dancers' mouths and bodies. The nine-person musical ensemble includes three player-composers from the Macedonian band Project Zlust, three Japanese musicians playing traditional instruments, and Japanese singer Sizzle Ohtaka.
The performers manipulate four large open-sided metal cubes by Ralph Lee that Chuma has used in other pieces—creating rooms, corridors, traps. With cloth screens added, the cubes can imprison or conceal a performer, create shadow plays, and receive projected words and images. Displacement and travel emerge as themes, along with the sometimes violent dramas they engender. With offhand athleticism, the performers—Ursula Eagly, Iskra Sukarova, Saori Tsukada, Steven Reker, Ryuji Yamaguchi, Christopher Williams, and Chuma—keep furniture and props such as tennis balls almost constantly moving into new configurations. They toss and slide tables; they make a cube somersault or spin around a dancing figure.
Clips from films by Jacob Burckhardt and excerpts from a 1995 film, After the Rain by Milcho Manchevski, show desert landscapes and images of fire, flood, and collapsed buildings that may relate to the 1963 earthquake in Macedonia's capital, Skopje. Scenes recall the Balkan wars: A man searches, guns are fired, a woman is shot, a wounded boy mourns her. Projected words tell of more recent violence. Williams, yelling, quaking, and falling, or Eagly crawling on her belly may reference these fragments or the performers' own private histories (there are also projected images of New York). A closeup of an eye with a welling tear is from a 2005 film by Hiroki Oishi, but the subject transcends cultural boundaries. The band, sometimes conducted by Chuma, slips from Balkan folk music into the accompaniment for a Kabuki drama. Ohtaka's amazing voice is at ease in Japanese melodies and modes that hint at Gregorian chant.
At one point, the cubes form a hanamichi, the ramp for Kabuki entrances and exits, and five performers demonstrate these as if running through a lesson, draping themselves in various fantastic, unauthentic ways in lengths of cloth. Later, three dive onto these "sheets" and roll themselves up (or are rolled up) to be briefly laid out like corpses. At the end, the cubes are being spun on a single corner, as if to remind us of the precarious balance between war and peace, life and death.”

http://www.villagevoice.com/dance/0704,jowitt,75598,14.html

Chuma's Crazy-Quilt Choreography Returns to Chelsea: N.Y. Dance
By Tobi Tobias
Jan. 15 (Bloomberg) – “I love everything about the theater,” Yoshiko Chuma says at a midday rehearsal of “A Page Out of Order: M,” which begins a five-day run tomorrow at Dance Theater Workshop in Chelsea. Known for her maverick imagination and crazy-quilt multimedia work, the Japanese-born Chuma has been a fixture on New York's downtown scene for over a quarter- century.
“But it's a very expensive hobby” Chuma adds wryly. No doubt: The new piece was created episode by episode over a period of five years in venues as disparate as Macedonia (hence the “M” of the title), Albania, Japan and the U.S.
With her company, the School of Hard Knocks, Chuma has made pieces for venues ranging from the Paris Opera to the Halloween parade in Greenwich Village, not to mention the private living rooms of patrons.
Chuma's earlier work brimmed with absurdist gaiety. Lately it has grown graver and darker. “Page,” while typically cryptic and inventive, offers intimations of the hardships of dislocation and conflict. The action, much of it abstract, is by turns violent, contemplative, agonized and quietly cooperative. Still, reflecting Chuma's temperament, its seriousness is leavened with considerable charm.

Ralph Lee Installations
The key element in ”Page” is Ralph Lee's installation of four 7-foot metal cube frames. Fluently maneuvered and inhabited by a six-dancer ensemble, they reconfigure and animate the space even more vividly than the choreography that goes on in, around and through them.
Often white panels are attached to the sides of the cubes to serve as screens for film projections of nature, architecture and local inhabitants drawn from disparate parts of the globe. Meanwhile, onstage musicians produce a lively cacophony while a narrator-singer provides a few vocal clues to what's going on - in Japanese.
The overall effect is one of magically and disconcertingly shifting boundaries. The social and political issues are, at most, a subtext. Chuma herself is against interpretation.
”Some people come to my performances looking for meaning and use up all their energy trying to find it,” she says. “I wish my audience would not have expectations or preconceptions. They limit the imagination. What I do is ambiguous. I don't have a statement. If I had a statement, I'd be a writer.”

Yoshiko Chuma and the School of Hard Knocks will be performing at Dance Theater Workshop,
219 W. 19th St., Jan. 16-20. Information: +1-212-924-0077.
(Tobi Tobias is the New York dance critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)