I saw Saburo Teshigawara for the first time about 20 years ago when I was still a reporter at The Japan Times.
He was emerging _ and very dramatically _ as a star of Japanese contemporary dance.
Now, in his 50s, he still stands, in so many ways unchanged.
His piece for his troupe Karas at the New National Theater is titled “Substance.” But it’s more about life/death, a statement from an older, wiser Teshigawara facing the inevitability/approach of Death.
For two hours, we were transported to a Moment when the daily drudgery/pettiness/greed no longer mattered.
And all that mattered was the Question.
Moving before us _ strangely frail and powerful at the same time _ he flapped his arms, contorted his torso, part rag doll, part clown, part victim, part angel, sometimes appearing to not breathe at all while at other times panting til we breathed with him.
He was just as austere and pure _ and giving of himself as ever.
But perhaps he was growing (I hoped) a little less hard on himself.
At least absent was the bloody, and so painful just to watch, self-mutilation of banging into scattered broken shards of glass, a trademark of his earlier pieces.
We are all lost in a dark urban chaos of loneliness and shapes without meaning.
And all we can do is writhe about and breathe, in and out, in and out.
At one point, the fluorescent lights hanging from above rolled out toward the audience, leaving us suddenly in a cold skeptical spotlight:
What are you doing? How have you lived your life? Who are you?