Also for Saburo Teshigawara, born in Tokyo in 1953, with studies in sculpture, mime and classical dance behind him, the obligatory European stage, where all his peculiarity immediately emerges with force, is the Bagnolet International Choreographic Competition. Upon his arrival in this revealing showcase with “Kaze non sentan”, or the tip of the wind, it is immediately evident that his dance language does not resemble that of the classical Japanese tradition or Butoh, the post-atomic Japanese modern dance. His way of placing himself in the contemporary choreographic panorama does not belong only to the East or the West, but arises from a very personal quality of movement, which can pass from the most controlled slowness, of oriental concentration, to the most technologically influenced speed in a body capable of astonishing and perfectly legible accelerations, in very high definition. He himself creates the sets, costumes and lights for his solos, such as “Here to Here”, ascetic and pure in an all-white cube, and for his group Karas, founded in 1985 with the dancer Kei Myiata, as in the case of the shocking “Noiject” set up in an enormous warehouse in Yokohama, with the stage covered in iron plates and with furiously noisy music. In Europe he has collaborated since 1990 with the TAT in Frankfurt, of which William Forsythe is currently artistic director, who invited him to create “White Clouds under the Heels Part I & II” at the Neue Oper, a piece that struck for its ability to evoke meditative calm, the fragility of existence, eternity and vanity at the same time. But Jiri Kylian also wanted him as a guest choreographer in 2000 for “Modulation”, destined for the Nederlands Theater 1. Even in the United States, upon his arrival at the Next Wave Festival in New York in 1992, Saburu Teshigawara was hailed as a truly innovative, surprising, unique artist. “Absolute Zero”, which has been defined as “movement in the absence of movement” is a 1998 duo that represents the quintessence of Teshigawara’s physicality, capable of making his own body, in dialectic with the air in which he moves, a sharp silhouette dressed in rotating layers of black dress, in contrast to that of his partner dressed in white, almost like his shadow in negative. Every bodily detail is enhanced, by the incredible speed or by the mercurial micro-vibrations, of the nerves even before the muscles, impressed on the apparently static limbs by Saburu; an unprecedented modality that seems to make him oscillate with ease between apparent spontaneity and millimetric precision, between divine grace and serene power, creating his own universe, his own breath of the world, around himself. The effect, magnetic, is of a superhuman seduction, of matter and spirit together, charismatically mastered. Teshigawara is also a writer, an opera director (Turandot co-produced by Bankamura in Tokyo and the Edinburgh Festival), an actor (in Sogo Ishii’s 1999 film Gojo-Reisen-Ki), an illustrator (Blue Meteorite, Kyuryu-do publisher, 1989), the author of installations such as Dance of Air (Munich, Frankfurt, Vienna) and the director of films such as the elegant T-City, about the disappearance of the body into transparency, and N-Ever-Para-Dice for the Japanese satellite TV network NHK, with Jacopo Godani (the Italian dancer and choreographer revealed by William Forsythe), David Kern, Kei Miyata and Teshigawara himself. Interpreter of sensational performances, in which he is buried to feel the pressure of the earth and gravity, or in which he walks on sharp shards of glass, «because time and space break when the glass breaks», choreographer of his own original version of the “Sacre du Printemps” for the ballet company of the Munich Opera in 1999 «trying to bring out the theme of sacrifice from the music and not from the story and using the physical and character qualities of the individual dancers», Teshigawara is the complete, truly new artist, who has imposed an unprecedented aesthetic and scenic poetics, rigorously three-dimensional in the essentiality of the void (“Vacuum”) and the darkness (“Documents”), to design intense - and abstract - textures of sensations, where lights and videos have a privileged place. Almost as if shaking hands with that daring American, Loie Fuller, magician of proto-technological colour and luminous veils, with whom Oriente Occidente 2001 inaugurates a new millennium and a new path of encounters at the extreme boundaries of creativity.
