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Hello all<BR>This is my first post, but I've kept notebooks of reviews I write on any performances I attend. I hope to be a professional critic once I leave school.<P>Anyway, I wanted to tell about this really different and dramatic company from Japan. ROSY CO presented a program called Chinoise Flower in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Peace Treaty signed between the U.S. and Japan in September 1951.<P>Kota Yamazaki is both a dancer and company choreographer, combining traditionnal Japanese butoh dance with modern dance and ballet. After a somewhat suspenseful opening, the geography of the dancers and the symbolic use of rose petals give an interesting commentary about the old and the new, the past and future of Asian culture.<P>The starkness of modern cities such as Tokyo comes from the stage setting itself, with its ink-black floor and backdrops set against the metal, futuristic-skeletal architechture of the Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts. <BR>The only swatches of color come from a small red folding screen in one upstage left corner and from the unforgettable 20,000 rose petals that are dropped from the ceiling over the stage at a crucial moment.<P>Chinoise Flower is a loose-ended story of the emotions between four men and four women. At the end of a stunning solo series, one of the men dies under a shower of real rose petals. Some of the flowers are fresh, others are whilted and dying, which shows a juxtaposition between life and death.<BR>The other dancers celebrate in movement at his funeral, but it is intentionnally unclear whether they dance to mourn or just because of being in a certain place at a certain time, which shows the flat coldness of all values in this desolate modern world where only traces of spirituality remain, yet those traces endure.
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