Adagio
choreography, lighting design: Saburo Teshigawara
artistic collaborator: Rihoko Sato
costume: Saburo Teshigawara, Rihoko Sato
music: Mahler, Beethoven, J.S. Bach, Mozart, Rachmaninov, Ravel, Bruckner
technical coordination, lighting assistant: Sergio Pessanha
wardrobe: Rika Kato
dance: Saburo Teshigawara, Rihoko Sato
produced by: Karas
touring: Epidemic (Richard Castelli, Mélanie Roger, Florence Berthaud)
premiere: Karas Apparatus, Tokyo, 2021
duration: 60’
Adagios from Mahler, Beethoven, Mozart, Rachmaninov, Bruckner, Bach, with largos and adagiettos as well. When I dance an adagio, my body melts, and my heart is suspended in space and disappears into nowhere. Words calmly disappear, and when meanings and existence are also gone, I feel I am living life and death.
Saburo Teshigawara
Saburo Teshigawara began his unique creative career in 1981 in his native Tokyo after studying plastic arts and ballet. In 1985, he formed KARAS with Kei Miyata. Since then, he and KARAS have been invited to perform around the world. In addition to solo performances and his creations with KARAS, Teshigawara has also been receiving international attention as a choreographer and director. He has been commissioned by many important ballet companies to create repertoire works. Teshigawara has likewise received increasing international attention in the visual arts field, with art exhibitions, films, videos as well as designing scenography, lighting and costume for all his performances. Teshigawara’s keenly honed sculptural sensibilities and powerful sense of composition, command of space and his decisive dance movements all fuse to create a unique world that is his alone. Keen interests in music and space have led him to create site-specific works, and collaboration with various types of musicians. Besides the continuous workshops at the Karas studio in Tokyo, he has been involved in many important education projects, and he also taught at numerous important colleges and universities. Through various projects, Teshigawara continues to encourage and inspire young dancers, together with his creative work. In 2023 was celebrated the 10th anniversary of his own private creative space Karas Apparatus in Tokyo, where he has created more than a hundred pieces as part of the “Update Dance” series. From 2020 to 2024 he was the Artistic Director of the Aichi Prefectural Art Theater. Teshigawara has received numerous awards and honors in Japan and abroad, including a Bessie Award (2007), the Medal of Honor by the Emperor of Japan (2009) and the title of an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters in France (2017). In 2022 he won the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale and was selected as “Person of Cultural Merits” for his outstanding cultural contributions for the advancement and development of Japanese culture.
Rihoko Sato studied gymnastics in England and the United States, where she lived until age 15. Having participated in KARAS’ workshops in 1995, she joined the group in 1996. Since then, she has performed in all group works, and also works as the artistic assistant to Saburo Teshigawara in all his creative activities. She is acclaimed internationally, as one of the main figures in Teshigawara’s works. In 2009 she presented her first solo dance “She” directed by Teshigawara, leaving a striking and emotional impression. Sato also assisted with KARAS’ educational projects and worked as dance mistress for Teshigawara’s commissioned works for numerous ballet companies. She received the Best Dancer Award for her duet with Vaclav Kunes in “Scream and Whisper” in 2005 in Cannes, the Japan Dance Forum Award in 2007, the Forty edition of Leonide Massine Award in Positano and the Japan dance critic award in 2016. In 2018 she received the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology's Art Prize. Same year, she made her choreographer debut.
They seem to explode and implode, radiate and collect energy, dissolve and open up to infinite emotional landscapes. They seem to age and rejuvenate, to be a daily gesture in tending the hands and looking for the viewer's gaze advancing towards it. And in this encounter between life and death, between light and dark, one remains kidnapped, dazzled by so much inner beauty.
© Exibart
…A piece that welcomes the public with a breath that is never identical to itself, a getting lost in a dance that lights up and darkens due to the emergence of shades and variations in chiaroscuro. A journey of movement that merges with music without being overwhelmed by the beauty of eight extraordinary adagios, but accompanying us into their intimacy. A piece that will remain in the memory of the spectators.
© Il Manifesto
An extraordinary show in which the presence of spirituality becomes the absence of gravity, in which the categories of time and space dissolve to fill themselves with life and make the public live the experience between music, dance and poetry. A gift of Saburo and Rihoko who once again confirmed among the most interesting and representative figures of that "thing" called contemporary dance.
© Danza e Danza
