By Sankai Juku. Directed, choreographed, and designed by Ushio Amagatsu. A DanceHouse presentation. At the Vancouver Playhouse on Friday, November 5. No remaining performances

The dancing was fantastic. Not everything else fared as well.

As a 30-year resident of Paris, choreographer Ushio Amagatsu has devised what can only be called Euro-butoh, drawing on elements from his Japanese heritage as well as the cultures that surround him in the French capital of the arts. The fusion is both provocative and, at times, quite gorgeous.

In its Vancouver debut, his company Sankai Juku presented Tobari: As if in an Inexhaustible Flux, a 90-minute work that fully embodied both eastern and western notions of contemporary dance. Facially inexpressive, ferociously trained, and slaked from head to toe in chalky white rice-powder makeup, the eight-member, all-male troupe epitomized what we’ve come to expect from butoh: deeply philosophical dance rooted in a peculiarly Zen form of existential thinking. Yet in addition to poses drawn from Shinto ritual and post-bomb horror, Amagatsu’s dancers seemed to touch on iconic postures taken from European art and European history, referencing classical statuary; the howling, agonized corpse-casts taken from Pompeii’s volcanic ash; and Michelangelo’s Adam from the Sistine Chapel ceiling, reaching out to touch the hand of God.

Of course, that could just be one western viewer’s interpretation. The problem with writing about dance this abstract—strangely, this presents no difficulty in simply viewing it—is that one is continually second-guessing the choreographer’s intent. Early on in Tobari, for instance, did Amagatsu mean to depict the birth of religion, with seven of the dancers splitting into four crouching labourers in ragged, kilt-like skirts and three upright monks in white robes?

That’s hard to say, but it was an intriguing twist in a work that purports to contemplate the meaning of existence.

By show’s end, however, any sense of narrative had fallen away, replaced by movement as timeless as the eternal stars, represented here by a glittering scrim of pinpoint lights. The message, if message there was, seemed both comforting and chilly: we are one with the cosmos, and as inconsequential as a single candle’s flame.

Where Tobari failed was in its curiously bland yet relentless soundtrack, played at a level that was too loud to be ignored. Composed by Takashi Kako, Yas-Kaz, and Yoichiro Yoshikawa, the score touched on chamber music, minimalism, noise rock, and Hindustani improvisation without really being anything in particular—and on the rare occasions when its damp blanket of banality lifted, the dancing seemed to come more sharply into focus. Powerful, complex, and enigmatic, Tobari might sound better in silence.