The Sky is the Limit

As Martha Graham so succinctly put it, “The body says what words cannot.” Such was the case when Butoh master Oguri, his wife Roxanne Steinberg, Spanish-born Andrés Corchero and Chinese movement artist Mao, talked up a metaphorical storm in a dance performance with three crack musicians at the Electric Lodge over the weekend. In their long-running Flower of the Season series, Oguri and Steinberg once again served up a range of moves, this time in solos, duets, trios and quartets that also ran the gamut of emotions: a fusillade, if you will, of feelings.

Performance

Oguri and Friends: “Sky. It’s!” Choreography by Oguri, Roxanne Steinberg and friends

Place

Electric Lodge, Venice, California, September 19-21, 2025

Words

Victoria Looseleaf

Oguri in “Sky. It’s!” Photograph by Denise Leitner

The somewhat cryptic program notes delineated this work as “A Dance + Music Composition in 7(12) Movements,” beginning with “Garden (solo + trio).” Indeed, with a large rectangular sheet of butcher paper serving as a kind of stage – and palette upon which to deploy their bodies in impossibly executed poses (think slo-mo squats, awkward somersaults and a bit of Noh theater exemplified by Oguri’s blackened eyelids), the work was a deep dive into a wonderfully phantasmagorical land where the music, full-bodied and rich, and the performers, neo-waltzing, skittering and jumping were echoes of each other.

Percussionist extraordinaire Alex Cline, Pipa player par excellence, Jie Ma, and superb saxophonist/flautist Aaron Shaw, situated around the stage area, provided a multi-dimensional soundscape tuned into the dancers’ every move, from a tiny curling of the toes to a body convulsed quasi-metronomically, or something as simple as a backwards walk, this merging of two art forms created a sensory nirvana.

And who better to help fashion such a state of bliss than Oguri! Bounding out in black pants and khaki-colored shirt, he was nearly unrecognizable and could, in fact have been an Oguri doppelgänger, although, quite frankly, there is no one like Oguri: Having shaved his head for years, the elfin guru of movement sported wild black hair and a beard, and was now tinkering with objects, including a shoe, a teddy bear, a watermelon and a colorful tote bag. And who but Oguri would then stuff the bag with several of the props before inserting his feet—one at a time—into the tote, literally toting/hopping himself off the stage in this whimsical exit, Cline’s gongs resonating, Shaw’s flute tootling and Ma’s strings vibrating.

From left: Oguri, Andrés Corchero, Roxanne Steinberg, and Mao in “Sky. It’s!” Photograph by Denise Leitner

A hard act to follow, for sure, but Corchero, Mao and Steinberg were more than capable, adding to the glories of the evening. Also attired at this point in variations of black-and-white work wear, the area then seemed to resemble an office space, with Keiden Oguri’s fine lighting scheme—here bright spots—showcasing the trio in, well, deep thought.

With the tableau akin to a WeWork space, it should have been dubbed WeDance, as this particular set of personnel wove in and out of each other, occasionally coming together to resemble a multi-headed hydra—or perhaps—a “Punch and Judy” plus one vignette, their arms akimbo. Steinberg and Corchero fiercely bobbed up and down, slight groans emanating from their mouths, as Shaw, meanwhile wailed on his sax, this wash of sounds hanging in the air like so many ripe figs.

With the lights lowered, and the walls painted black, Mao, garbed in all-black, made a simple outline of a door on the back wall with white paint. A spectacular backdrop for a Steinberg solo, it reminded this reviewer of the term outre noir (beyond black), an idiom coined by French painter Pierre Soulages (he died in 2022 at 102), to describe his own über-ebony works.

In front of this door that was incapable of opening, Steinberg, at first, rocked slowly, a melancholy look on her face, the music now elegiac, as she wrapped one arm around her head before turning her back to the audience. Slowly slithering downwards, she resembled nothing less than a Greek goddess, albeit one garbed in Vionnet-like attire.

Was she trapped in nothingness, a void, struggling to free herself from a world reduced to a lone cell door, a cage? Whatever, wherever, or whoever she was, Steinberg was not afraid to embody the surrounding darkness, her contorted body coming to rest on her back, knees bent.

Roxanne Steinberg in “Sky. It’s!” Photograph by Denise Leitner

The scene soon passed, though, and Steinberg hied off the stage and up an aisle, leaving Mao to take her place on the butcher paper. Drawing with magic marker—either Chinese characters, scribbles or doodles—this gal was intent upon the task at hand, Oguri soon joining her in this calligraphic exercise.

Call them a confederacy of Butoh artists, with a cavalcade of moves boosting the music, the music also heightening the dance. Whether bow-legged and bouncing to Ma’s occasional twangy solos, Oguri, breathing heavily, with every exhalation abutting the sonic mosaic, proved compelling.

Each dancer then began muttering softly—mostly indecipherable words in their own language—English, Japanese, Chinese and Spanish. Appearing spent but never static, the quartet could have been extras in the Sydney Lumet film, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, this, however, a dance-a-thon of a completely different stripe.

As the lights dimmed, there was Steinberg, standing tall and sputtering words including, “preposition,” “promise,” “pregnant,” “pray.” This reviewer would add to that, “primeval perfection,” the accent on perfection.

And so it went: A quartet of extraordinary movers who had given each and every ounce of their beings to the dance, then acknowledged the musicians, their gorgeous web of sound also key in helping make this a most remarkable evening.

To all the artists, we humbly say, “Namaste!”

Victoria Looseleaf

Victoria Looseleaf is an award-winning, Los Angeles-based international arts journalist who covers music and dance festivals around the world. Among the many publications she has contributed to are the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Dance Magazine and KCET’s Artbound. In addition, she taught dance history at USC and Santa Monica College. Looseleaf’s novella-in-verse, Isn't It Rich? is available from Amazon, and and her latest book, Russ & Iggy’s Art Alphabet with illustrations by JT Steiny, was recently published by Red Sky Presents. Looseleaf can be reached through X, Facebook, Instagram and Linked In, as well as at her online arts magazine ArtNowLA.

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