Saburo Teshigawara and Karas Dance Company
Dancers
Saburo Teshigawara Kei Miyata
Rihoko Sato
Mie Kawamura
Azusa Yoshida
Yukiko Doi
Chisato Mizukami
Stuart Jackson
Evroy Deer
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Luminous
Sadler's Wells
11 - 12 October 2003
Luminous is a choreographic masterpiece danced with virtuosity and refinement, litheness and lyricism. Saburo Teshigawara, who created it for his company Karas in 2001, is also lead dancer and, with his long-time collaborator Kei Miyaka, responsible for music, costume and scene design. His choreography is thrillingly liquid and - through both movement and stillness - boldly explores the sculptural qualities of the human body. Trained in classical ballet as well as the plastic arts, Teshigawaraís dancing seamlessly integrates the formal and amorphous, controlled and wild, slow and frenzied dimensions of his choreography.
In part 1, the dancers streak in and out of patches of light which at first seem to entrap them, but from which they eventually escape with spellbindingly mercurial gestures. Light is explored with glass mirrors, luminous constumes, light-box silhouettes and masterful use of spotlighting. And darkness - which in Teshigawaraís fertile choreographic imagination seems so much more than merely the absence of light - is embodied in the remarkable Stuart Jackson, a dancer blind from birth whose contact with the space around him feels almost physical. When he spreads his hands, or tries to touch the air with outstretched arms, or twists and turns in a space that he seems to have perfectly measured out, he brings alive a world - almost a world-view - experienced through touch and movement alone.
After the interval, the atmosphere changes completely. Strange figures, phosphorescently lit, some minus heads or hands or entire upper torsos, caper around elusively. At one point a cloak flies over the stage. A nun-like figure is suspended mid-air. Two walls enclose a glowing green figure, and open and shut like a huge book. And then all this eerie activity gives way to a meditative solo by Teshigawara, in white on a bare stage, who alternates floating movement with sudden sharp slicing curves and fast spilling turns. He is eventually joined by a black-clad Jackson. They circle around each other, in a dialogue that seems incomprehensible to the on-looker and yet vital in every sense of the word.
The only irritation in Luminous is the portentous and sometimes vapid poetry read by Evroy Deer, which gets in the way of the dancing and dilutes rather than adds to its ëmeaningí. Apart from that, however, nothing is sensationalist or kitschy. Above all nothing is arbitrary: everything feels essential in the indefinable way of great art.
Simon May
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