Festival ’90 : A SPRITE WHOSE HEART BELONGS TO DADA : Saburo Teshigawara dances on the edge of Japan’s avant-garde, treating air as though it were a fickle medium to fall through

Like a Nike ad, Saburo Teshigawara has a thing about air. Air as the medium of dance. Air as a metaphor for the physical rendered into spirit. Air as the realm of reverie. Air as a gas that mutates as freely as Teshigawara on an open stage.

In a poem, he coins the phrase “architecturing atmospheres,” which could be an eloquent stab at his own job description. And his recurring color is blue, as in “Blue Meteorite,” the production he and his Tokyo-based dance company, Karas, will perform as part of Los Angeles Festival.

Teshigawara choreographs as if he were most comfortable when falling through air. “Born of the air,” he writes, “and by it known.”

His movements seem designed for a zone in which gravity is fickle--at times dense and unforgiving, at times slight as match light. The range of his tireless glide through space is astonishing. From the double-jointed friskiness of a marionette, he’ll flick into mock-Frankenstein lurches, fast-forward skitters, electro-shock staggers, and all the hydraulics of a mime having nightmares.

Teshigawara moves in waves and spasms, a kind of REM of the body--seemingly involuntary, as if driven by some cohabiting demon, or by squabbling multiple personalities. Teshigawara calls it the Cut-Puppet-String Theory of Dance and tries to name its aspects in another poem: the Dragon-Fly Midair Freeze, the Skeleton Fall, the Silverfly Turn, the Ant Pose, Moth Make-up, Dwarf Perspective, Malachite Mnemonics, Full-Moon Slendering.

In a recent major production SRO crowds in Osaka and was titled “Kitai,” a word that refers to both expectations and to the transformation of solid into gas. An alchemist of moves, he studies the ways in which the physical can escape to the ethereal.

In person, Teshigawara is a sprite and his heart belongs to Dada. Small-framed, he is a shy man child with ramrod bearing, a monkish whitewall haircut and bent grin. He will wriggle away from pat theories about his work, defending against cliches with constant wordplay.

The French, who adore Teshigawara and give him prizes, like to call him “the Pale Child,” after one of his dance titles. But done up in the whiteface and white hair of his performances, he has the look of a vampirical cherub--vulnerable as an urchin, diabolical as an agent.

For Teshigawara, memories of childhood have had a stronger impact than anything else, certainly more compelling to him than the catalogue of modern dance signatures. Although everyone from Martha Graham to Pina Bausch has been imported to Japan, directly or by inheritance, the most original choreographers there--and Teshigawara is the most original of his generation--seem to have followed deeply personal visions, and what Sam Shepard called buried children.

Critics refer to his “fall and recovery” device (he and his dancers often collapse in mechanical repetition) as a link to Western modernism, but he would probably rather ascribe it to something like his precarious first toddle.

“When I was a child, the sudden realization that I was alive, and not just a blank witness, made me feel iraira --irked. Which made me wonder why I was born,” he said.

It’s that virgin Angst that Teshigawara brings to his dance. If the West has given him anything, it’s the Freudian license to root about in his subconscious for puzzle parts to play with.

Like the Surrealists of which he is fond, Teshigawara puts a lot of faith in the automatic, the improvised. He shares with John Cage an obsession with chance.

“I want to create accidents on stage, in my body,” Teshigawara said. “It’s a constant fight against myself, between control and accident. It’s not a peaceful internal process. That peaceful state is not necessarily a good or healthy thing. Sometimes it’s a scream from the body, or silence, that is needed to create a new form. Freedom is more important than structured thinking.”

He speaks of the intelligence of discreet body parts, and a world in which muscles tell secrets, bones pray, nerves laugh. Call it the anatomy of memory. “Not only memory,” Teshigawara says, “I want to say dream. I think we dream in our bodies, in the joints, the arms, every part.”

He talks about seeing his own body from a distance, and each of his dancers move about as if cocooned from one another. But despite this disembodied quality, there’s a romantic sheen to his art. “My body is here, and my heart is on the moon.” Although it can look as cool and detached as operatic minimalists like Robert Wilson, it sweats the poetry of symbol-drunk somnambulists.

Karas is known for its striking imagery. Glass, of course, offers the transparency of air, and one of the most startling of Teshigawara’s effects is when he tramples shards of glass and then reappears with the shards seemingly piercing his entire torso--a postmodern St. Sebastian. Teshigawara, who dictates virtually every pictorial detail, studied drawing and sculpture before entering his five-year training in classical ballet. It has aligned his senses. “I don’t live to make dance,” he says. “When there is something I want to express, if I hold a pen, it will be poetry, if I have a canvas in front of me it will be a painting, and if there is space around me, it will become a dance.”

In 1985, in a notorious solo spectacle, he remained buried up to his neck beside a river bank for eight hours, an investigation of the relation between air and the body. It was a turning point, as was his first meeting with Kei Miyata. An admirer of his work, Miyata became his manager and soon helped him form Karas. Despite having no prior training, today she is his prima performer, a petite dynamo with a gift for deadpan humor and precision swooning.

You can’t talk about contemporary Japanese dance without invoking butoh. L.A. audiences have seen a bit of it, most notably the 1984 appearance at the Olympic Arts Festival of Sankaijuku--who left the indelible image of four bald, wiry, ash-covered men in loincloths suspended upside-down on ropes from the flies of Royce Hall’s proscenium.

Butoh has many shapes and moods, much of it quite macabre. What holds this “dance of darkness” in a single arena is its groping toward the primordial. Everything in butoh feels ancient and earthbound. Its trademark grimaces and agonizing slowness of pace have as much to do with the sheer weight of time--and the relentless goading of the id--as with all the sturm und drang usually attached to it by critics.

Teshigawara is really butoh’s alter ego. His dance is melancholia made airborne, and ignited by a nervous personal history rather than by an apocalyptic racial past. It is butoh transported from tribal fireside writhings to stylish urban non sequiturs. It is butoh quickened with the nutty syncopations of vaudeville, the suave giddiness of commedia dell’arte. (One Parisian reviewer called him a “Pierrot lunaire.”)

Teshigawara once spent an evening with Kazuo Ohno, one of butoh’s revered progenitors, but was simply told that dance cannot be taught and that he must find his own way. So he did. What remains butoh is Teshigawara’s flirtation with the limbo between life and death. Teasing out moments of morbidity, he seems to find sad, strange beauty more satisfying than smug conventional beauty.

This is what makes the pieces so Japanese. Teshigawara denies wanting to make anything that defines new Japanese dance, and he hopes festival audiences can see beyond Pacific Rim stereotypes. But it’s hard to avoid the island flavors: The scattered blue stones in “Ishi no Hana,” a Japanese rock garden reinvented with theatrical fakery; a famous model dressed in kimono, idly spinning an upturned bicycle wheel; a giant carp, part of the folk iconography of Japan, gingerly handed to Teshigawara as if it were an infant; the androgynous plain cotton garb so often worn by the dancers, echoing the ages-old gender vertigo of Japanese theater.

“In music and rhythm,” Teshigawara says, “there is no feminine or masculine reality. It is the same in my dance.”

And the preoccupation with elemental forms (air, earth, moon and what Teshigawara calls “metaliquids”), as well as with the notions of in-dwelling spirits and life-as-illusion--bring to mind the entwined Japanese creeds, Shinto and Buddhism.

At the same time, Karas is of its age. The scores feel blessed by Cage and Tower Records. “It’s from the level of noise,” Teshigawara says, “that music grows in my pieces.” Apart from a lot of throbbing industrial percussion (imagine Kraftwerk doing an album on steel mills), his audiences hear Rimsky-Korsakov, Debussy’s “L’Apres-Midi d’un Faun,” French folksongs arranged by Canteloube, bagpipes, electronic-music composer Yannis Xenakis, military music, bits of David Lynch’s “Eraserheard” and of a Wim Wenders sound track, jazz trumpet and so on.

As with everything else in Japan, technology is the foil--either resisted or embraced. In one dance, a live tape recorder sits on stage; in another, a soldering iron is applied to a metal plate worn by Miyata, causing great bouquets of sparks to fly.

“Being surrounded by technology will create a whole different kind of dance,” Teshigawara says, “because our feelings will be influenced by these things. What’s scary but interesting is the prospect of replicating humans through genetic engineering.”

The hottest choreographer in Tokyo has no fear about dance keeping up with the modern world. “Dance is a spiritual thing, therefore it’s futuristic. I think I’m dancing in the 21st Century.” P