What starts out with Shoko Ito charmingly asking the audience if they love someone with Japanese pop songs gently wafting into their ears quickly devolves into a series of dreamscapes that, despite the performers gleeful enthusiasm, has little apparent focus or meaning. After the initial query is posed to the audience, the fourth wall erects itself quickly as Ito takes the audience along on her journey to Tokyo with strong physicality and a succession of sequences that allude to various cinematic genres (Coming of age, Sci-Fi, Crime, etc.) where Ito as protagonist never seems to completely succeed. Upon her arrival in Tokyo, she wakes up and experiences what seems like a brief ritual while she heads into work. If it werent for the strong sound design in the first half, the piece would just be a jumble not letting the audience know if theyre in a dream, or a dream within a dream; without other compelling aspects of stage craft, it is impossible to know which state Ito is in. Itos movement and gestures are initially quite specific and compelling, but as the piece progresses, they just became repetitive sloppy histrionics.
