At the Dairakudakan performance space in Kichijoji, a group of female performers move with the particular deliberateness of the butoh dance style. Their partners in the dance are snow-white noh masks, fully true to tradition but with one important modification: lurid red tongues extend and curl from their mouths. The dancers bite the masks' tongues, holding them a few centimeters from their own faces in silent, mirrored confrontation.

Akaji Maro, who founded Dairakudakan (Great Camel Battleship) in 1972 and remains its prime inspiration, watches over the rehearsal, a large notebook open before him. His taut frame leans out toward the performers in poised attentiveness. He calls out instructions, but his key directions take the form of gargled yowls: "Give it more urrrhg!''

Maro's involvement with the spectral world of butoh dates back to the 1950s and his studies under Tatsumi Hijikata, the founder of the style. Over the decades, Dairakudakan has been guided by a number of Maro's concepts, including tempu-tenshiki ("being born into the world is a great talent in itself") and ichinin-ippa ("one dancer, one school"), which stresses the importance of individuals developing unique movement vocabularies.

Dairakudakan has performed Maro's work in more than 25 cities around the world. It has also provided opportunities for its younger members to develop and stage original works.

At only one point in the evening does Maro offer what sounds like criticism: "Do you think that's good as you're doing it? You think that's OK?"

In the past, his reprimands took the form of ashtrays and other objects flying onto the stage, but Maro has worked with many of these performers for years and there is a palpable sense of trusted communication.

This rehearsal is for the latest performance Maro is directing, "Tamazare (Soul Games)," which will be at the kabuki-style theater Zenshinza in Kichijoji May 18-21. Working on a kabuki stage offers access to unique facilities, such as the hanamichi stage running through the audience pit and various traps doors, and the production will use these to its dramatic advantage.

"It's rare for us to perform at this kind of setting so this will be the only chance for people to see this particular staging," says producer Yoko Shinfune. "It also probably accounts for the relatively large number of references to Japanese culture, including things like fertility rituals."

Later, five women use the large wooden frames of New Year's bento boxes as supports for languished stretches and extensions, or as portals that lead to new worlds. The women are, Shinfune explains, hakoire musume (daughters in a box), a traditional expression for pampered girls.

The stage is now occupied by three women who wobble about with black lacquer phalluses attached with gold paisley ribbons, bow-tied at the pubis. They lean back and stagger forward, eyes half rolled into their skulls, frozen smiles suggesting ecstatic transport.

Maro is evidently pleased.

"Where before I might have known 7 to their 3, the situation is now reversed. The younger one's have started stealing the secret sauce. Ha!"

Death and glory Communication, for Maro, is a whole-body experience. His words -- complex, erudite and elusive -- convey only a small part of what he has to say. A few minutes into an interview with The Japan Times prior to last Wednesday's rehearsal, his torso starts a gentle pivoting, arms extending out and pulling in. In doing so he sets up a physical resonance and rhythm that is, like butoh at its best, an invitation to share a nervous system.

"Butoh is about defeat, about collapse," he says. "It is an aesthetic of decline and ruin. Glory always casts a shadow, and it's that shadow I'm drawn to. I want to explore human weakness, what remains in the wake of fallen glory."

Butoh emerged from the avant-garde dynamism of the first of postwar decades. But Maro denies any explicit connection between Japan's geopolitical defeat and the defeat he seeks to portray. It is something more primordial, mined from the strata of human memory, a surrender before the overwhelming powers of nature.

"I think the first experience driven into human consciousness was terror. For early humans everything must have been terrifying -- lightning, storms, natural disasters. So we started bargaining with nature, offering respect and veneration in return for forgiveness. From our modern perspective this might seem like self-deception, but I think that, fundamentally, all culture started as an offering, a form or dialogue, exchange and bargaining with the gods.

"For me the starting point for butoh is to make a sacrifice, an offering, of myself. In Japanese we say the customer is god, so butoh performers make an offering of themselves to the gods who are our audience. But there is within that a secret, hidden sense of heroism. A kind of rapture, the joy of having been selected for the sacrifice."

Maro lights another cigarette in an unbroken succession and the smoke curls into light slanting into the high-ceilinged performance space. While acknowledging that butoh, with its small, intensely devoted following, probably qualifies as a cult, he cheerily denies any larger pretensions.

"Butoh is not religion. I don't think we can directly appeal to the gods through a superb performance and thereby stave off Armageddon. But I do think it can offer an antithesis to the march of modernity. It may be a very small gesture of resistance. And in the end, it is illusory."

If it were to be a religion, butoh would be the first one constructed purely of self-doubt and irony, a deliberate turning away from glory and light. And yet, Maro says, "I think the people involved in butoh want to rediscover a sense of the preciousness of living things. They want to offer their prayers, their requiem, for the repose for all that is finite and doomed to extinction."

Nor is the world of butoh, for Maro, one devoid of hope.

"It may already be out of fashion to say so, but we always have our nihilism. I have a very simple formula. If there is negativity in the world equivalent to say a value of negative 100, if you can multiply that by some element with a value of negative 1, this is transformed to a value of positive 100. So we are always searching for that element of negative 1. That is where hope comes from," says Maro, his large smile tinged with earnestness.

"To achieve this, it can't be addition or subtraction, the interaction with the audience has to be multiplication. Multiplication suggests a jump or leap. But at the same time we have to be honest. If there is change or transformation, it occurs in the virtual world of the performance. But that might just possibly lead to people having a different outlook or perspective.

"It's the finishing touch, the final daub of blue that makes the painting of a dragon come to life and ascend into heaven. What was dead comes back to life. Or at least appears to."

Bodies in motion

The discussion turns to the function of gravity in Maro's work, his comments punctuated by expressive enactments of being crushed by unbearable burdens, and then rising on fluttering wings.

"My method involves a really excessive sense of gravity, which we emphasize far more than we need to. But for the audience, this can provoke a counter-reaction. I call this method various things, including 'density.' By making excessive use of one element, an inversion occurs, a reaction that makes the audience feel light and the performers appear somehow to be weightless."

Using the term "Aufheben" -- as in transcending something -- from Hegelian dialects, Maro speaks of his wish to bring into a higher synthesis the contradictions of East and West, past and present, good and evil, beautiful and ugly.

"But again, rather than seeking the heights, I'm more concerned about falling into a well."

He describes the tension of contrasts and their mutual necessity, as he extends one arm toward an abyss: "The deeper you go this way, the further you can reach that way. So that from the midst of what might appear foolish or degrading, something very noble suddenly shines forth. Again, it is the search for the pivotal element of negative 1."

Butoh can cause an audience to swing wildly on more than one axis: self/other; normal/abnormal; and the continuum of what Maro calls our "biological memory," all that which links us back to the prehuman.

There are some solo performances in Dairakudakan's butoh, but ensembles are far more frequent. They are clearly linked by common characteristics that seem to mark them as a particular species or life-form. But within that commonality, there is a distinct sense of the individual, idiosyncrasies that differentiate, make unique, but stop just short of "character." The audience is presented with the dilemma of how far or deeply to read human qualities into the beings on stage.

But maybe even that is beside the point. Maybe these are just bodies in motion.

"Think about Newton and the apple," Maro says. "Newton discovered the law of gravity while watching an apple fall. But your ordinary peasant isn't going to discover any such thing. He's more likely to think: 'We're in for a poor harvest again this year.' There might be a hundred different ways different people would view the same event.

"But what I'm really concerned with is the apple. What happened to the apple after it fell? It certainly isn't thinking about gravity. It isn't aware of falling or trying get our attention," Maro says, briefly miming an apple in search of approval.

"Butoh might be like that. We're just apples falling. Everyone is free to interpret us as they wish. Perhaps someone observing us very closely might discover some hugely important law or principle. But we're just apples falling from a tree, we're not thinking about anything in particular. I think the fact that we start from the viewpoint of meaninglessness makes us lighter relative to gravity. We can weaken its grip."