New York Times |Dance Review | « Bodies Engaged in Unspoken Dialogues » by Gia Kourlas Published |December 18, 2009

There are a few unanswered questions in Kota Yamazaki’s dreamlike “Rays of Space,” which opened at Danspace Project on Thursday night, but that’s part of the point. The work, a collaboration between Mr. Yamazaki and the French artist Cécile Pitois, revolves around elusive structures in which light and bodies create a vaporous landscape of flowing and fleeting energy. The program includes a quotation from the German poet Novalis: “We are more closely connected to the invisible than to the visible.”

In Mr. Yamazaki’s production, that idea is a guiding force. The set design, credited to Ms. Pitois, features strips of orange tape arranged on the floor like rays of light. (It’s a little underwhelming.) Ms. Pitois, according to her program note explaining the work’s concept, seems to be more intrigued by the abstract connection between the performers and the audience and how perspective is “experienced in ways both infinite and discrete.” (…)

Midway through is a duet between Ms. Nishimura and Mr. Sasamoto, whose flinty presence creates a new set of vibrations; moving side by side, they look as if they were floating underwater. In his quiet, articulate “Rays of Space,” Mr. Yamazaki creates a conversation with bodies, in which unspoken thoughts take on a language of their own.