If you are to have any hope of appreciating the virtues of Sankai Juku you have to enter its unique time frame. The globetrotting Japanese butoh troupe unfolds its shows with excruciating slowness and agonising attention to detail. In Kinkan Shonen (Kumquat Seed), which opened the company’s London season, the audience’s attention is asked to decelerate into slow motion.

Kinkan Shonen, choreographed by Sankai Juku’s founder Ushio Amagatsu, is the group’s first major production (it was made in 1978) and one that helped to build its fashionable reputation. Its stylistic credentials are indeed impressive, with stunning visuals that mean it often looks like a sumptuously composed photograph. The stage is defined by a set of looming textured walls. A red circle suspended over the dancers is the show’s primary symbol (the circle of life, I presume), while a live peacock, which struts about most of the evening, is the show’s most chaotic element. The music is unremarkable, though efficient.

Asking Kinkan Shonen to make sense in a conventional way is not going to get you very far. Its apparent theme is evolution, encompassing the life cycle of a single individual and the greater sweeping one of the human species as a whole. The images are primordial and elemental, while at the same time referencing uniquely human horrors. A quartet of men undulate like fish underwater, but it looks as if their faces have been blown away.

Butoh was born in the 1950s, in the aftermath of the Hiroshima bomb, and it’s not surprising to find the form obsessed with death. The production’s six men, with their white-painted bodies and shaved heads, hover in a netherworld between the living and the dead, where pleasure is a momentary relief from pain.

Amagatsu doesn’t so much choreograph as sculpt his dancers into repetitive and obsessive movements that thrive on tiny accretions. Sometimes they seem ludicrously precious (what’s the diva solo about?) or even just plain ludicrous (is that man miming having sex with the peacock?). At others his movement delivers moments of nihilistic shock or intense beauty.

The dancers have an astonishing ability to master even the smallest muscle and to transform their bodies into mysterious non- human shapes. It’s a skill you can appreciate in Sankai Juku’s second production, Toki, which will be performed on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

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