Insistent drumming accompanies dancer Masanori Asahara as he swirls about in the darkness around a single low-hanging light. As the lamp rises, Asahara enters and remains within the cone of light like a moth drawn to flame. His movement grows wild and jerky. He leaps and falls, grunting with exertion, until a blackout engulfs him.

The magic of the visuals and costumes is quickly apparent in an eerie scene that seems to combine Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” with Noah’s flood. Bathed in smokey amethyst light and vibrating vocal echoes, a frozen sculptural figure (danced by Irena Romendik, who also codesigned the costumes) is pulled dreamily across the stage on a rolling platform. She reaches upward with one arm while clinging to a gnarled tree branch with the other. Adding to the surreal scene, two long tendril-like antennae sprout from her temples and a short branch grows from one breast. The backdrop flickers to gold as she pauses her journey to look back. Then she continues her crossing.

After a blackout when the musicians leave their posts and climb onstage, the lights rise on a dialogue between Oliveros’s voice and Watanabe’s flute─coming from opposite sides. Oliveros’s phrases sound like pleas─perhaps the unanswered, intensifying cries of a child seeking comfort. They belong to an invented language. Watanabe contributes a flurry of shrill cadences on the flute. The voice and flute overlap, matching energy. Then, in an amazing physical feat, Watanabe and Oliveros descend to the floor and roll slowly toward each other─all the while, continuing their vociferous duet.

As Watanabe plucks delicate strains from the koto, a fluctuating, fiery nebula is projected onto the backdrop. Spot-lit, dancer Akane Little slowly rotates─feet gliding along the floor, arms and torso spiraling in floating suspension, as if locked in a transfixing orbit with the distant, luminous nebula.

More visually evocative scenes roll by until all five dancers fill the stage. In what might be a formal ritual, they begin pulsing, reaching, spiraling, twitching, and jerking to a rhythmic chant and the drums’ steady beat. The dancers accompany themselves in this last gasp for life with vocal shouts and vocalizations of whirring and whooshing. On the backdrop white cloud-like forms ripple through a sea of purplish blue that eventually turns a solid red.