But that’s another story. This was Oguri’s tale, one that he, and he alone, could tell. His head bobbing in rhythm to the smaller clarinet—to each squeak, to each sonorous doodle—the Japanese-born Butoh dancer oh-so-slowly rose on his feet as the music, too, ascended. Slight of stature, but seemingly huge on stage—no matter that we, the audience, were mere feet away—Oguri took on the visage of a primate, even as he managed a series of—yes—mini-bourrées.

Clownish, he could have been Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin or the tragic puppet Petrouchka, the lunacy of his dance actually appearing waltz-like. Or was he the Pied Piper, with Golia tootling away, now on alto sax, bidding us to follow? Casting his shamanic spell, Oguri was, himself, bewitched by the music, trying, as it were, to grasp the sounds in his weaving hands. 

But these were far from Fosse’s jazz hands, because Oguri was, to put it bluntly, the jazz body! 

As Golia pulled out all the musical stops on his winds, Oguri became the wind, a rag doll, lithe and limber, but in utter control. This segment had the syncopation and lightness of the ear-wormy, “Pink Panther” theme, with the dancer again the cream clown, transitioning, somehow, to the floor, where he, too, took on the guise of Wyatt’s Christina. Or was he building an invisible sand castle, this beachcomber on the moon, then lying prone as if a snow angel?  

Either image more than sufficed in this 40-minute saga, as Oguri began an intriguing—and quite literal—face-off with Golia, the arpeggiated runs triggering the dancer to inhale some kind of rarefied air, air that we can only hope to be breathing. 

Still, to be in Oguri’s presence, watching, is—must be—enough, as he lifted the brim of his hat to at last reveal his ageless face.

Back on the floor, with Golia now trilling on his bass clarinet, Oguri got up on one knee only to begin crawling in a movement that can best be described as slouching towards nirvana, taking us, the lucky ones, with him on this insanely gorgeous journey. His elongated strides, his tiny leaps, his stilted quarter turns, are a declaration of art, of dance, in this black box space that now seemed like a church, with Oguri the preacher nonpareil.

“I’m free, I’m alive, I’m delirious,” his body seemed to declare, his arms spread wide in crucifixion pose, baring his soul in a dance, never to be repeated, but one, nevertheless, for the ages.