We interrupt this program….

… to urge you to get thee to the Japan Society for Big Dance Theater’s “The Other Here,” running only through Saturday. I mean, if you live in New York. (They will be touring to San Francisco, Houston, etc. later this year.)
Two stories turn each other inside out: one, set in semirural Japan, features a salesman whose greatest attachment is to a fish (though even it arouses ambivalence in him); the other takes place at a conference of facile American life-insurance agents with booming AM-radio voices. Everyone–Japanese and American–runs smack into life and loss while intending only to get on with their work.
The stage space repeatedly breaks open–with Japanese rural foot paths becoming a ticky-tacky American auditorium, then a dance platform for Okinawan folk steps delivered in a deliciously brazen Western style, then a pond for a carp as big as a dolphin. Likewise, one scenario’s strands of absurdity and pathos feeds the others’.
The ensemble of actor-dancers is tremendous, plus there’s a real belter of a blues singer (one Heather Christian) to deliver the Okinawan pop.