Recently, Miro Dance Theater invited Ikuyo Kuroda, a rising star in the Japanese dance world, to perform in Philadelphia. I was speaking with Miro’s artistic director Amanda Miller about it, and asked what kind of dance it would be.  She told me that she couldn’t quite describe it, but I pushed for a box to put it in, so she said “ballet-butoh fusion.” I couldn’t imagine what a combination of ballet and butoh would look like. From previous shows that I have seen in both genres, I can say that about the only things the two art-forms have in common are that they both involve body movement and they both begin with the letter b. But when I saw Ikuyo Kuroda’s livewire dancing filling up Miro’s studio at Girard College, I knew that the ballet-butoh fusion label was just a label of convenience, a quick classification cooked up to give the audience some context. As soon as she started moving, the label fell off like a sticker under hot-water. It was only Ikuyo Kuroda, celebrating with her body.

At the beginning of the dance, Kuroda was inert on the floor while her accompanist Jiro Matsumoto laid down a backbeat by knocking the body of his guitar and using a loop-recorder. He began to play over the looped beat, a tune that was an intersection of Spanish, middle-eastern, and Japanese styles—it sounded like a samurai bullfight in the Kasbah. Once the thick atmosphere of the music took hold, Kuroda’s body animated and stood, moving slowly toward the center of the space. She began a little arm-flapping, grass-kicking dance that looked like nothing more than a young girl daydreaming under a blue sky. Then her body twisted around and her arms and legs exploded in all directions at once—she leapt up and came crashing down repeatedly, writhing between midair and the floor. After a minute she resumed the young-girl dance, but her face was different, darker, like the little girl had seen something forbidden, tried to erase it, but was now marked and changed. It was intense and genuine. The guitar layered on more mood, and Kuroda kept on.

Over the course of 30 minutes her face and body described pain, ecstasy, uncertainty, struggle, glee, mania. She played both puppet-master and puppet, a duality of control that I had never before seen localized in one person. In her movement was the grace of ballet and the puzzle of butoh, but there were a dozen other ingredients that I couldn’t identify, that might only have existed in that dance at that moment. The dance and music created a mammoth construct, a world of expression far larger than the room in which we sat. About 70 people watched from an intimate distance, half of them grade-schoolers, all of them rapt. After half-an-hour, past the limits of her physical endurance, Kuroda collapsed in a heap, and the audience flinched as one, then exhaled.

I was asked to translate for Kuroda and Matsumoto during the Q&A session that typically follows a Miro performance. After watching Ikuyo’s dance I felt spent and had to muster up my energy reserves to get in front of the crowd and translate. I can only imagine what the performers must have felt like. But Jiro started strumming a light, smiley tune about lovers kissing which revived both the dancer and the crowd. Ikuyo pranced around like a teenager in love to this short piece—totally different from the high-voltage performance we had just seen, but just as true—and then we arranged chairs facing the audience to start a conversation with them.

The adults asked thoughtful questions of the sort you would expect to hear at an independent dance show—about progression of technique, about levels of intimacy varying with performance space. I was more affected by the questions from the kids, which had a direct frankness that plugged right in to the rawness of the performance (Q: What’s your inspiration? A: Life itself. Q: Doesn’t it hurt when you fall down? A: I got used to it.) And I was struck by what Kuroda said while discussing her philosophy of dance: “I dance until my body doesn’t want to move anymore. Then I push myself past that border. Once I cross, everything I do is true. That’s the dance my body is supposed to do.” When I heard her say this, I felt I was sitting next to a master.

After the show and the Q&A, the adults milled about or said goodbye. Meanwhile, Jiro Matsumoto began playing a funky guitar line and Ikuyo Kuroda started a mini-dance party with some of the kids. She followed them and led them at the same time. I can’t label how she was dancing with them… but if I had to, it would be a fusion of ballet, butoh and hip-hop.