Top Ten Reasons Why You Should See Sankai Juku – KAGEMI: A Metaphor For Mirrors

10) They tour with rice cookers.
9) The technical director did the load-in wearing a leopard-print do-rag, tight black pants, and kung-fu shoes.
8) When Sankai Juku toured with HIBEKI they requested washed white beach sand. It arrived as wet sand and we had to turn our rehearsal room into a hotbox to dry several hundred pounds of sand by show time.
7) The dancers are on a huge world tour, perform every night, and still help load out the set.
6) When you buy a hammer in Japan, you only get the head. All the handles of the crew’s hammers are handmade. (And they’re weirdly straight.)
5) Butoh is a form of dance born from a nihilistic post-Hiroshima Japan. In fact, the word butoh means “dance of darkness” and the first ever butoh piece ended with the smothering of a live chicken between someone’s legs, which got the piece banned from the festival where it premiered.
4) White is the new white. And rice flour is the new Ben Nye.
3) Ushio Amagatu founded the company in 1975 and still dances.
2) Dancer Toshiuki Takada fell to his death in 1985 when he was hanging, head down, from six stories up the façade of Seattle’s Mutual Life Building in SHOLIBA.
1) Mmmm… meditative body control… totally hypnotizing…

Seriously, the show mesmerized me despite the tepid NYT review. They're coming to UCLA's Royce Hall in November before leaving for Koala Lumpur, so catch them in all their monasteristic, ritualistic, white-caked, lotus flower hovering glory while you can.