Choreography,
Installation
Saburo
Teshigawara
Lighting and
Costume design
Saburo
Teshigawara
Music compilation
Kei Miyata
Saburo
Teshigawara
Dance
Saburo
Teshigawara
accompanied by
Kei Miyata
Rihoko Sato
Lighting/technical
coordinator
Sergio Pessanha
Stage manager
Jarn Fenske
Stage
Markus Both
Sound
Neil Griffiths
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Bones in Pages
Saburo Teshigawara
Queen Elizabeth Hall
22 - 23 October 2003
Saburo Teshigawara is a magician of movement. Even when he stands stock still he seems to be in motion - or threatening to be. At such moments, so much energy is compacted into the immobile solitary figure on the stage that you, the observer, suspect yourself of missing something, perhaps a gesture too minimal or swift or implied to notice.
Bones in Pages, originally created at Frankfurt's Theater am Turm in 1991, is a work of extraordinary, relentless violence. Even the interludes of wistful delicacy are charged with menace. Here is a man, somehow representing Man, suffering and protesting at violence, perpetrating it, meditating on it, refusing it, tolerating it. The menace is compounded by a stage installation comprising one thousand books and a thousand shoes - in neat arrangements that, to a European viewer at least, provoke associations with Nazi book burnings and concentration camps where the shoes of the condemned were diligently collected by their murderers. And, above it all, a live crow is perched, its brooding, restless presence so haunting that its movements too seem choreographed.
The pacing and phrasing of the work are brilliant, aided by Teshigawara's customary virtuosity with lighting, which he uses to conceal as much as to illuminate. The work begins and ends with Teshigawara's powerful head spot-lit in Zen-like meditation, though it seems anything but empty of thoughts. He is joined by two female dancers, who enact their own solitary agonies and furies but are every bit a part of his uncompromising engagement with the chaotic hell of human violence. This is very much a non-Western portrayal of horror: for there is no hint here of ultimate redemption, no hint of any theodicy in which destruction is finally outwitted and outweighed by creation, or evil by good.
Simon May
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