© Dominik Mentzos Teshigawara 'Luminous' reviews Teshigawara in reviews Saburo Teshigawara co reviews more Olivia Swift reviews

Although based in Tokyo, Teshigawara rejects what he describes as the conservatism of dance in Japan, preferring the wider scope of the European dance scene, which for the last decade has welcomed him with open arms. Ballet Frankfurt commissioned Teshigawara to choreograph for them in the mid 90s and since then he has gone on to choreograph for the likes of Bayern National Ballet, Netherlands Dance Theatre and the Paris Opera.

Last year Teshigawara's latest contemporary dance work Luminous opened the Edinburgh Festival and now has migrated south to Sadler's Wells as part of Dance Umbrella 2003. As the name suggests, Luminous is essentially about light and dark but in reality offers more. If the amount packed into Luminous is anything to go by, Teshigawara has found over the last decade in Europe plenty of the scope for creative growth that attracted him to the continent in the first place. In every aspect – set, costume, sound, speed, choreography, lighting – Luminous is never one thing. Its soundscape combines Mozart with minimalism, silence with sirens. The pace swings from frantic to static and the choreography from group formations to solos and duets.

 


Saburo Teshigawara's Luminous
© Dominik Mentzos

The set starts out cluttered with an array of light-manipulating screens and other devices, and then gives way to moving mats and walls, and finally finishes barren and bare. The lighting uses silhouettes and phosphorescence that give figures and flying coats a garish glow, and none more memorably than the small witch-like figure suspended on high in the second half before she falls and flashes to the ground.

Movement too shows multiple influences. While contemporary, what makes Teshigawara's choreographic style recognisable is its arm-led movement in which both classical influences and stereotypical as it sounds, an Eastern serenity, come through. Teshigawara is also known for his solos, and in Luminous the solo features towards the end of the piece. Although overly long, the solo's initial silence and stripped-down set act as the sorbet between the full flavour of that which had gone before and the duet dessert that awaits at the end. Immediately following it comes a group section that shares the solo's loose-limbed, serendipitous style. Then after much anticipation at the end of the piece comes the much-talked-of duet between Teshigawara and Stuart Jackson.

Blind and with a mild learning disability, Jackson's collaboration with Teshigawara has, we're told, changed his life, helping increase his range of motion, confidence, natural sense of movement, and ability as a dancer. The company similarly has benefited from the collaboration, gaining an increased awareness of their bodies' capacities and orientations. Watching the collaboration in action didn't change my life but it did change my understanding of the nature of a duet. Dancing on the same stage but with minimal interaction choreographically and no eye contact, Teshigawara and Jackson's duet is unusually defined as such by a bipolar opposition acting on a symbolic rather than physical level: Teshigawara dressed in white is light seeing, Jackson in black is dark and blind. Never is this bipolarity more poignant than at the very end when Teshigawara stops and turns to Jackson. Now both Teshigawara and the audience are still and watch Jackson, transfixed. Jackson watches no one and moves alone.

 


Saburo Teshigawara's Luminous
© Bengt Wanselius

This most intriguing of duets left me feeling uncomfortable and unsatisfied. The collaboration between Jackson and Teshigawara is billed as symbiotic but as they ran in circles on the stage I couldn't help wonder who was chasing and who was being chased. Teshigawara with his shaven head and white clothing, dancing to the sounds of an organ, carries a calm about him that borders on that of the religious saviour who opened for Jackson, a bright new world.

Uncomfortable with such connotations, I was also frustrated by watching a piece that was laden with symbolism but denied interpretation. The theme of Luminous is the relationship between light and dark, a theme that is universally understood as a useful polar pair to with which to think. Watching everything that takes place in Luminous, one can't help but think in turn about the opposition between other related polar pairings: East and West, good and evil, sight and blindness, watching and doing, and yet Teshigawara in interviews asks us not to analyse and neither does he offer any insights into meaning of his work. Meaning may not exist, and it may be wrong to look for it, but the structure of the work makes it difficult to not, especially the use of random snippets of text delivered by actor Elroy Deer (which all to often come across as toe-curlingly pretentious).

Teshigawara is clearly a thinking choreographer, attested to by the inclusion in the Luminous education pack of everything from extracts from Conrad's Heart of Darkness, to an account of life under Pol Pot, and reproductions of work by Turner, Rembradt and even a Pink Floyd album cover. If such was the eclectic mix of influences on Luminous, is its audience not entitled to a little more insight into the thought processes behind the piece? After all, as Teshigawara said himself in an interview with critic Donald Hutera, dance should be clear and it is clarity that has weight. It is a belief cruelly not delivered in Luminous.

Saburo Teshigawara's Luminous
© Dominik Mentzos

Such denial is indicative I suspect of a wicked sense of humour in this self-consciously mysterious artist. Surprised laughter had met moments of his choreography on more than one occasion. During his solo he had stopped, walked towards us teasingly and then carried on dancing. Even during the curtain call, the now-normal looking dancer who was previously the hanging witch, flashes phosphorescent as though to haunt us on our way home. Teshigawara is it seems, a man who likes to play. And in spite of my reservations about Luminous, I'm confident that there's plenty more artistic ground out there on which he'll do so.