sarma

Once, some time ago, Kei Takei was having trouble with her visa. People wrote letters to the Department of Immigration, praising her work, trying to convey how unusual and beautiful it was. Nothing seemed to work. Finally, we discovered what was wrong. We weren't using the magic words, "exceptional ability," or something like that. (Your child, madam, shows exceptional ability in Clay Modeling, but performs disappointingly in the Sandbox.)

I don't know whether to be disappointed or relieved that there were no immigration officials in the audience at Brooklyn Academy's LePercq Space a couple of Sundays ago to take in (or try to) the awesome spec tacle of Takei's complete Light (Parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII and I X). The event lasted almost seven hours, with generous food breaks, and it was an important seven hours to me - hours in my life, hours out of my life, hours for my life.

Takei has been making and showing sections of Light since 1969. Most of them are strong and plain - a few actions, stunningly simple, cluster and swim about some mysterious guiding principle, some halfguessed truth. Put together in this giant structure, each section shimmers with new import. The whole dance now seems to embody man's dogged, almost blind determination to keep going - to rise after every fall even when rising becomes an impossibility, to keep dancing even when his limbs are bound, to create what is constantly being destroyed, to obtain the unobtainable. But because of the ingenuity and almost painterly beauty of Takei's structures, Light is not simply grim. It can appall you, delight you, and move you to tears. Takei's ideas may sound related to those of Samuel Beckett, but the pristine strength and deliberateness of her work strike me as unmistakably Eastern. And the mystery. I think of certain Japanese poems: every phrase is simple, every word is clear, yet at every reading new meanings branch from them.

I had never before thought about the title, Light, but after seven hours spent with the work, it seemed a useful key. Takei often uses blackouts within a section, and these periods of darkness elongate your sense of passing time and unchanging activity. From light to light. Nearly everything in the dance is white - objects, sets, the bulky cotton kimonos and/or loose pants that everyone wears. But, also, you can think of each section as expressing a feeling about light. In each of the first four parts, Takei sets up contrasts between those who are at home with "light" and those who stay in "darkness," between those who can't see" and those who can. For instance, in Part II, a woman advances slowly toward us in a straight line, her eyes fixed on a light. Around her in diminishing circles, two other women toil, bent under huge packs, making a monotonous rite out of swinging, dropping arm gestures. At the end, their path curls in behind her, and - still unseeing - they follow her. Or take Part IV running in with piles of big white cardboard pieces, Carmen Beuchat proceeds to put together a jigsaw puzzle that will fill a white frame (perhaps 15 feet square) laid on the floor. The other people may use only the rapidly shrinking areas of dark floor. These people, like visions that inhabit darkness, are often bizarre; a couple of the women scurry around twirling umbrellas, and for a while John de Marco struts like a chicken. They're pathetically docile, though; Beuchat easily shoos them out of the way with her cardboard pieces. She treats them like big pets that might just turn nasty and hurries to complete the puzzle. One more piece, and they're crowded unprotestingly into a small corner. Blackout. When the lights come on, they're nowhere in sight.  Loan Schwartz, Wendy Osserman, John de Marco, Abel, Richmond Johnstone, John Parton, Barbara Mitsueda - these, in no particular order, were most prominent among the many vital and valiant performers in Light.

"Exceptional ability . . . " by all means. That too.