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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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Queen Elizabeth Hall
22
- 23 October 2004 |
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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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