Dance review: 'C(H)ord' hard to forget

It's a curiously compelling thing when performers push aside their humanness, when movement is so bizarre as to make you forget that you're watching humans. But then the inkBoat ensemble, and especially director Shinichi Iova-Koga, whose "c(H)ord" premiered Thursday night at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, are remarkably adept at generating simple images that you just can't get out of your head.

Like most of the 10-year-old inkBoat's butoh-inspired theater, "c(H)ord" - a commission for YBCA's Making Peace series - is hardly literal or linear. Boasting an international cast - which includes Finnish performer Heini Nukari as well as the Japanese Takuya Ishide, Yuko Kaseki and Sten Rudstrøm (both based in Berlin) and Sherwood Chen, Dana Iova-Koga and Dohee Lee - it's the sort of show where you can't seriously ask yourself what just happened. The pleasure lies in allowing its vagaries to cascade past you episodically, and the overall effect is not so much discomfiting as strangely charming.

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inkBoat and Nanos Operetta

Boy's avian affair never quite gets off the ground

Even before the lights went down, a palpable sense of anticipation and excitement pervaded the audience at "Our Breath Is as Thin as a Hummingbird's Spine," the cabaret-style collaboration between experimental theater troupes Nanos Operetta and inkBoat, which opened a three-weekend run at the ODC Theater on Friday night. And why not? The last time that these two companies shared a stage was during Nanos' highly acclaimed "3 Drops of Blood," a series of 10 crazy sexy cool showcases.

Nevertheless, if you're an unsentimental and relentlessly literal type, "Our Breath" -- an episodic, absurdist journey through one man's impossible love affair with a bird -- may not be the show for you.

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