The performance company Dumb Type, based in Kyoto, has always been a bit of a political animal, an in-your-face shape-shifter through dance, the visual and plastic arts, text, conceptualized performance, mime, puppetry and film. And because it has been an enthusiastic investigator of gender politics, transvestitism and the sex industry, it has provided the rest of the world with contemporary commentary on issues both general and particular to Japan.

Dumb Type performs "Memorandum" at the New National Theater.

Largely due to this involvement in varying sectors of society, Japan's top export in the contemporary performing arts -- almost constantly on tour overseas with major commissions from prestigious venues -- has been accused by very serious people in this country of marginalism, of a dependence on the refreshingly tacky arts of vaudeville, cabaret glamour and cross-dressing. But the irony of its current run of the new work "Memorandum" at the New National Theater in Tokyo through Dec. 16 is that the very seriousness it dedicates to the creation of art has resulted in a piece of "high" art dictated by a conceptualized pulse and shorn of the previous beloved romping through social sensitivities and niceties.

As Dumb Type's relentlessly charming late leader Teiji Furuhashi said, "productions should be a finger on the pulse of society, and sometimes its conscience." "Memorandum," despite the startling intensity of its visual and musical work, points no finger.

Performer Takao Kawaguchi feels that this is perhaps a natural development for a company whose art used to mirror its personal lives so closely. "When Shiro Takatani took over as the driving force of the company after Teiji's death, we naturally became a more visually grounded group," he says.

Takatani has a keen perception of the resonant power of visuals -- his work last year on Ryuichi Sakamoto's ill-conceived opera "Life" was perhaps the only element that saved the entire production from oblivion. Yet the joy of watching a Dumb Type production such as "ph" or "S/N" was always tied to a sense that it was larger than life and a million times more interesting.

The selling point for "Memorandum" is that it is so finely crafted, and in true Dumb Type fashion, crafted and recrafted for each venue. Thus the current reincarnation of the work at the New National focuses on astonishing visual elements, film projected and interspersed with moving performers, shot from behind in an eerie opalescence, filtered and refiltered through our consciousness until the chance alighting on one of a hundred images, movement patterns or words in the spoken and projected text is as random as our control over which shard of memory slides into our consciousness at any given moment. Memories also crowd in as the images plunge to darkness and the score, buzzing around on what seems akin to megaphone hornet frequency, abruptly veers off into silence.

Structurally, the piece also follows the way our memory works, so that the token rummaging in a pocket halfway through recalls a search earlier on, or a prop in one scene reminds us of the same prop used in a different context. When performers make notes onstage with the twists and turns of the writing magnified to flamenco rhythms, this segues into a splendid scene where a dancer upturns a wastepaper basket of torn papers into a perfect mold and distributes them around the floor by jumping at them and waving her long hair in their direction. There's also a short, very welcome piss-take where performers in bear costumes vacuum up the mess that "Goldilocks" has made of their house.

Unfortunately the audience when I saw "Memorandum" at the beginning of the month was either brain dead or had had their humor nerves Novocained. The bear scenes hark back to the ingenious opening scene with performers crawling along the stage in real-time, while behind them their filmed bodies clamber in shadow fashion from word to word on an incomplete text which hints at the heartwarming tale of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears." Sticklers for tradition would say here that porridge was the menu of choice for these bears, not soup, but customs vary and childhood memories morph into half-rememberings.

As Furuhashi put it, the "stage representation of self" has become more muted in this production and the dance element more refined until what sticks limpetlike in the memory banks are those fantastic, driving images by Takatani. Other superhits are the solo by Kawaguchi to Nat King Cole's "Unforgettable," a challenging four-panel shot of Hidekazu Maeda in a room with a bear visitor, projected at different developments of the action with one version repeated real-time onstage, and Norico (sic) Sunayama's solo at the end of the piece.

One scene, in which Takatani shows us it's far better not to see the wood for the trees, involves the performers gravely dancing, changing partners, moving their hips from side to side like a slow-mo conga in a huge projected visual on the back wall and stage floor of a forest.

Despite a slightly predictable, overconceptualized spoken text and distracting 3D images of cups and chairs spinning in and out of focus in the middle of the projection, this dreamy scene blows mind and memory. It is Dumb Type at its best, simple and intense. Remember to go see this.