Wit, magic and illusion took over the stage at Kanagawa Kenmin Hall on March 26-28 when Philippe Decoufle and his Compagnie D.C.A. closed the Contemporary Arts Series with "SHAZAM!" The opening filmed sequence of performers vanishing and reappearing through a series of frames, laid the tone of the piece: illusion and its celebration.
Decoufle is a master magician. He plays with the surreal by melding live dance with the same patterns on film, drawing the eye to dancers making shapes in frames disappearing into each other at the same vanishing point.
Imagine looking through a picture frame in which an ominously large human finger beckons, behind which another picture frame outlines a tableau of dancers in position, and yet another frame behind that has a dancer squeezing his entire body within its rectangle. The spectator's eye searches out the vanishing point, all the while registering shadows and repeats of patterns on film monitors, seeing the dancers from the front of the stage and from other dimensions in the filmed dance taken from the wings and the back of the stage. One of Decoufle's best tricks is to follow the dancers behind stage, where they perform a poetic counterpoint to the main theme on the stage proper.