The buckethead Butoh of Akaji Maro.

Dairakudakan ("Great Camel Battleship"), the foremost Butoh company in Japan, was founded by Akaji Maro in 1972. Maro recently encouraged his longtime company members to create their own works for his studio Kochuten ("Paradise in a Jar") in Tokyo, and two of these works comprised the Japan Society's Second Annual Butoh Festival in July.

The group is known for its flamboyant and excessive physical theater, its assault of stark, lush imagery and lunatic visuals. Lit with saturated color, impeccably detailed props and propulsive sound collages mixing Western and Asian sounds, simple objects are transformed into operatic tableaux of horror, humor and fabulosity. And unlike the performers of its spin-off Sankai Juku, Dairakudakan's dancers don't become totemic androgynous bodies, but remain individual persons.

Often nude but for micromini posing straps, they vibrate with sexuality. The men are all sinew with beautiful skinny asses, as wiry as Gollum. The women's alabaster skin fools the eye into seeing a delicacy that hides their ferocious hearts. After any exertion, a cloud of powder from their chalk-white body paint fills the air.

The first evening-length, all-male work, "Universe of Darah?Return of the Jar Odyssey," choreographed by Kumotaro Mukai, is an Aristophanic cautionary tale of rapture, devotion and queasy delight. This is transgressive and transcendent butoh as if made by Jack Smith, featuring cross-dressing deities and extraterrestrials.

It begins with the thrill of an arena rock show. Sirens blare over what might be the Eraserhead soundtrack and four men running in place, alternating with Streb-like falls, funky chicken moves and Tae Bo. This prologue is followed by a techno throb while program notes are projected like film titles.

In the next scene, a bunny-eared man reclines on the stage. As a toy rocket ship is drawn toward him on invisible wire, he becomes a metaphoric moon. Episodic blackouts reveal the four running men, now space explorers, who circle Moon with what look like handheld vacuum cleaners before executing a ritualistic dance. Moon is delighted to hit each rocket man on the head, but soon yawns. The rocket men deify Moon, then torture him a little, then colonize him.

After a blackout, a robotic, dainty "girl" in a short powder-blue frock with a big, red brain on a plate enters. Her face is eerily alive, eyes glowing, as she frightfully and obsessively caresses and receives jolts of energy from her brain. Sick with pleasure, she enters a reverie in which a lascivious, Gene Simmons-tongued, yellow amphibian with an agreeable dahlia protruding from his butt crack performs a pretzelly duet with a folding chair. Moon is carried in by the rocket men to do a Lewinsky to Frog's yellow lamé crotch. As his reward, Moon is enthroned on the folding chair center stage.

A bald drag queen swaggers in wearing enormous platform heels and packing a wallop of an erection under her purple gown. Perhaps she has been watching all these proceedings from some royal distance. She tosses bananas to the now obeisant rocket men and replaces Moon in the central seat. Her minions eat her bananas and become rutting hanumans while an aria from Tosca morphs into a dazed and confused electric guitar solo.

During this orgy, Moon fellates Frog a second time and Frog gasps, "Nam-myoho-renge-kyo," the primary chant of Nichiren Buddhism and its controversial, political offshoot Soka Gakkai International (SGI), which translates as "hail to the mystical law of the Lotus Sutra." For followers of SGI, Buddha is a kind of Santa Claus, who grants all desires if you chant accordingly. So the entire cast enjoys a druggy, obscene apotheosis. It is the true meaning of Christmas.

The second, all-female (except for four male supernumeraries) work, "Su Ru Me?The Woman Who Grabs Happiness," choreographed by Atsuko Imai, is less accessible, more meandering and certainly less fun. Perhaps based on a folk tale, it features a steadfast Everywoman who undergoes a series of trials and attains perfection.

A peasant scrubwoman with a wooden bucket on her head is initially watched by two figures in the traditional seated postures of Buddhist avatars. These women have mastered what is called cutting a mie in traditional Kabuki?the fixed, placid cow face, the cross-eyed hillbilly face?accompanied by high squeaks. Later, three wild-haired beauties are troubled by deep turquoise-hued succubi and three sea monkeys caper in undulating waves while three hungry ghosts ululate. But the narrative is muddled and each mise en scene becomes stale.