Saburo Teshigawara / KARAS
Rose Theater
New York
July 9, 2010
by Kathleen O’Connell
copyright © 2010 by Kathleen O’Connell
The audience for the New York premiere of Saburo Teshigawara’s “Miroku” knew exactly how long the work was supposed to be: the house staff was at pains to both apprise us of its length—70 minutes—and warn us that there would be no intermission. (In other words, hit the restrooms now.) But time, it turns out, is peculiarly elastic in the disquieting universe of “Miroku,” whose solitary inhabitant seems bound in a cycle of serenity and struggle.
“Miroku” is the Japanese name for Maitreya, the Future Buddha. According to Buddhist tradition, Maitreya will appear on earth when the teachings of the Buddha have been entirely forgotten and the world has lost its way. He will renew those teachings and restore the path to nirvana.
The eponymous work is over before you know it—or at least before you expect it to be. Not because the time flies by—there are sections of this hypnotic dance-solo-cum-light-and-sound-installation that feel like they go on forever—but rather because the light, the sound, and the movement, though varied in texture and effect, are deployed without the kind of cadential inflections that help us tell theatrical time. Each episode seems to take place in its own eternal present. “How much longer can this go on?” I thought at one point, only to wonder “Wait, was that a whole 70 minutes?” when it was over. Nor does the work’s structure—sharply contrasted episodes punctuated by blackouts—telegraph that the end is near. When the stage goes dark for the last time, it takes more than a few seconds to realize that the lights aren’t going to go back on again. If it’s Teshigawara’s intention to play with our heads by distorting our sense of time, it’s cunningly done.
Now in his late 50’s, Teshigawara studied both ballet and visual arts in his native Japan. He makes dances, but he also makes films and art installations. It’s not surprising, then, that
“Miroku” achieves its effects as much through lighting, set, and sound design as through movement. (All are credited to Teshigawara. Neil Griffiths and Kei Miyata share credit with him for sound.) The work unfolds within a high-walled, three-sided box that fills the entire stage and appears to have no exit. Starkly geometric patterns of light, augmented by a spare compilation of sounds—some mechanical, some musical—continually transform the environment in which Teshigawara moves. Sometimes it’s serene; sometimes it’s brutal; sometimes it’s liminal.
Teshigawara in motion looks like a 3-D computer animation of hip hop popping interleaved with tai chi. It’s like watching an emulation of weighted dimensionality rather than the real thing. It’s a cool effect, and a disconcerting one. The creature on stage seems at least two removes from human and moves in ways no human body naturally does. It’s nonetheless impossible to watch with detachment; you find yourself anthropomorphizing a construct portrayed by a real person, and it’s creepy.
Teshigawara has stated that “dance is not a form for the purpose of communicating information,” and the work’s effects are duly visceral rather than intellectual. Its episodes enact contrasting states of being, not events in a narrative arc: they have impact rather than meaning. In one arresting set piece, Teshigawara stands flattened against the back wall while vertical bars of blue light race around box’s sides in sync with the accelerating roar of an onrushing train. It looks and sounds like imminent calamity. But not many minutes later he slips into a soft square of hazy light with slow, underwater grace, blowing out lungfuls of air to a benign drone.
The most intense lighting effects—the ones that seem the most disorienting and industrial—are reserved for the episodes of struggle. Teshigawara’s gestures correspondingly signal distress, though, as in the episode described above, they are often more subtle than mere flailing. In an earlier episode, he stands at the center of the stage, his face whitened and thrown into sharp relief by a bright overhead light. His head shakes from side-to-side in small tremors as he tries to follow the flashing lights that circle his box, ultimately unable to synchronize his gaze with their movement.
Some episodes are less deft. A gimmicky set piece in which Teshigawara fools around with a bare bulb suspended into the box from above feels as if it’s been airlifted in from another work, and it rankles. He pulls the bulb towards his face to cast a huge shadow against the wall, then pushes it away to make a tiny one. He uses it to make himself a new head. When it starts to flash in time with some juddering guitars, he turns it into a machine-gun dick (yes, really). It’s all gratingly puerile, and while that may have been the point, the gestures feel 50 years old and out of kilter with the rest of the work in both their particularity and their pointed depiction of very human agency. (It’s the only time Teshigawara appears to take charge of his environment.)
Although he takes care to vary the texture, pace, and intensity of his movement, Teshigawara sometimes drifts off into rhythmically slack noodling. It’s an odd lapse in a performer who seems otherwise keenly aware of what his body looks like in the particular space that surrounds it. Teshigawara is nonetheless a stunning mover and “Miroku” is a marvel of stamina. His canny use of lighting to change the look of his body in motion—to amplify its scale, to reduce it to a two-dimensional silhouette, to throw his torso into relief against his limbs—gives him the wherewithal to hold the stage through “Miroku’s” hour-long cycle of suffering and rebirth.
copyright © 2010 by Kathleen O’Connell
Photos by Stephanie Berger
Top: Saburo Teshigawara in “Miroku”
Bottom: Saburo Teshigawara in “Miroku”
