Juni One Set: Stunning Immersive Mythos with Myriad Arts

CW: Brief mention of sexual assault in context of reviewed performance.

The concept of Total Theater has been played with and experimented upon by many multi-faceted creatives. It’s a grand merging of the arts, weaving together dance, mime, music, narrative, and visual arts (be they painting, sculpture, or video design) to create a dynamic and fully rounded performance. 

The modern dance era saw a resurgence of this Total Theater with artists such as Sergei Diaghilev, Michio Ito, and Martha Graham, who fused these theatrical elements with the movement qualities of the new age, often lacing performances with mythological influences and returning dance to its ritualistic origins. 

The Degenerative Art Ensemble sought to accomplish the same feat with their performance of Juni One Set: boy mother/faceless bloom, diving into the depths of human understanding through art, movement, music, and myth/poetry. 

Devised by the creators, Senga Nengudi, Yuniya Edi Kwon, Haruko Crow Nishimura, and Joshua Kohl, the piece flowed between narrated poetry of the Shaman character (Nengudi), choreography performed by Kwon and Nishimura, music composed and performed by Kwon and Kohl, and video projection designed by Leo Mayberry. 

It began like many myths do: in darkness. Thin beams of light panned over the space from the back of the house, curious and searching. Nishimura and Kohl descended upon the stage with headlamps strapped to their brows, exploring the space with a playful curiosity. Once they arrived, lighting by Jessica Trundy illuminated the set and established the world of the performance. Transparent projection screens stretched across three points of the set, two of which concealed platforms the performers utilized throughout the performance. 

Yuniya Edi Kwon playing violin

Allina Yang

The performers took up their positions for the beginning of the show, and out emerged Kwon in an elegant, uniquely designed, and beautifully androgynous costume. With a violin perched upon her shoulder, she set the bow against the strings and made the instrument weep. Kwon utilized an interesting technique, weaving together plucking, strumming, bowing, and whistling to compile a dynamic and engaging, yet mournful musicality. 

Midway through this, she paused, lifted her bow to the audience as a sword lifted in challenge, and with a deep, rumbling voice, she sang a powerful verse. It was sung in another language, but the audience didn’t need a translation to be captivated. Slowly, the powerful notes scattered into a more twittering sound, and the song grew ever more deranged, fading out for the next segment.

Here, the Shaman character entered. She read a stanza of poetry which highlighted the mythological theme of the performance: “No beginning. No end.” A perpetual cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth. 

Spoken narrative within a performance can often be an incredible asset. Where words cannot convey something entirely, movement and music step in to solidify it, and where movement and music fall short, words can flesh out the audience’s understanding. Proper usage of this fusion can keep an audience enraptured; however, the improper usage pitches a performance into a lull. 

In this, Juni One Set struggled some. The Shaman’s words held power, but her voice and delivery felt monotonous when placed beside Kwon’s opening vocals. Still, the words played a vital role in the understanding of the performance and were written beautifully. 

The movement sequence which accompanied the spoken word segment highlighted the butoh influences within the choreography. Motions were intricate, isolated, and took on an almost trembling quality, growing more fractured (like the song before) as the sequence went on. Slowly, Kwon removed the top layers of her costume, revealing only a skin-tone wrapping about the chest and a flowing skirt of the same color—vulnerability and nakedness.

With creature-like movements, she mimed the consumption of some forbidden fruit. Perhaps it was the apple which bestowed knowledge upon Eve. Perhaps it was the magic plant Gilgamesh set out to consume and attain immortality. Or, perhaps it was neither of these myths. The beauty of her mimesis shined in its vagueness. No matter the reference, her performance demonstrated the essential catalytic moment that thrusts a character onto the journey toward a deeper understanding of life.

At the end of the sequence, Kwon ascended a ladder which led to the platform behind one of the projection screens. Backlit by a warm light, Kwon bent over into an agonized fetal position, its shape silhouetted upon the screen. Meanwhile, Nishimura returned to the stage. She plucked up a long paper skirt that had been strewn across the stage as a set piece, donned it, and assumed a similarly bent-over, agonized pose. 

Throughout the performance, intentional pauses highlighted the masterful composition of the staging, lighting, and scenic design. Every pause between movements was a work of art. 

The silhouette faded, leaving Nishimura centerstage in her paper skirt. Her performance was backed only by ambient noises and whispered words, allowing the rustling of the paper to become the music. Nishimura wrapped herself in the paper skirt like an insect in a cocoon, and for a moment, she seemed consumed by it. Suddenly, it became an oppressive thing, and the dance turned into a waging battle. She emerged from the cocoon and was consumed again and again. Birth, death, and rebirth. 

Haruko Crow Nishimura in paper skirt / Allina Yang

Hints of a narrative began to unfold within moments of great artistry. Kwon’s next sequence took place behind the projection screen, haloed by a hanging, circular and cage-like sculpture, illuminated in gilded amber, which cast an ethereal glow. It seemed an emergence from the cage behind her, the rising of life.

From this came an aesthetically stunning scene centered around the depiction of a world tree. Nishimura dangled from its roots which cascaded over the upper-centerstage, and its branches stretched eternally over the projection screens—life and myth given visual form. 

Nishimura detached herself from the umbilical-like root, and a conversation began between her movements and Kohl’s live audio engineering. Musical notes followed movements in a call and response, and the dance developed character. Expressions and movements were bold and portrayed a child-like abandon. Nishimura utilized mimesis to introduce a story of a joyous youth and a looming beast, features changing back and forth between the two personas like the swift switching of a face-changing mask.

We then followed the path of a child in a moment of play. The fourth wall came down, and the audience was invited to sing fragments of a song. The melody was a bit too complex without a backbeat to help keep time, and the execution of it lasted too long. The song became a jumbled mess which drowned the prettier audio beneath it, distracting from the beauty of the performance. 

As in life, the joyous play could not last. The looming darkness fell upon the performance and the beast descended. Nengudi narrated a sobering tale of a mother’s rape, sacrificing herself to keep the intruder from straying to her slumbering child in the next room over. Ribbons were stretched across the stage like bleeding veins to a ritualistic, melancholic chant: the Korean words for “my mother.”  The vocals layered together and echoed throughout the space, establishing a haunting, melodic cry that set nerves on edge. 

Art is meant to move, to disturb; in this, Juni One Set succeeded.

Yuniya Edi Kwon performing

Allina Yang

Once emerged from the darkness, the performance reached its end. Nishimura bestowed a mantle upon Kwon’s shoulders to the powerful roll of ceremonial drums—symbolism of the child turned adult, the loss of innocence. 

The final movement sequence was performed in what can best be described as the decaying skeleton of a dress and hoop skirt. Red ribbons streamed from Kwon’s wrists: death. An end, or perhaps a beginning. 

While abstract in its delivery, Juni One Set was a brilliant representation of the artistic potentials of Total Theater, and it pushed the bounds of it in the contemporary era.