Miroku - Walker Art Center

McGuire Theater
Thursday-Saturday, April 22-24, 2010
Miroku
Saburo Teshigawara/KARAS
Walker Art Center and Northrop Dance at the University of Minnesota present
Nightly Events for Miroku
Thursday the 22nd: Join us after the
show in the 4th floor Balcony Bar of
the McGuire Theater for an opening night reception/celebration.
Friday the 23rd: Stay after the
show to participate in a Q & A with
Teshigawara and Performing Arts
Program Manager Michèle Steinwald.
Balcony
Bar
Enjoy a post-show drink in the
upper balcony of the McGuire
Theater for discounted beer,
wine, and sodas.
Stay Connected
Get advance notice on special events and
ticket deals via e-mail and stay in the loop
by participating in performance reviews
and discussions online.
blogs.walkerart.org
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TiCkeTS/informaTion
Visit the box office, call 612.375.7600,
or go to walkerart.org/tickets.
Saturday the 24th: Join us after the
show at SpeakEasy—a casual conversation in the Balcony Bar initiated by Walker
Tour Guide Jenny Skinner. (Think book
club discussion, only performance style).
The SpeakEasy conversation is for any
Thursday-Saturday showgoer of Saburo
Teshigawara's Miroku performances.
For more information on the SpeakEasy,
visit Jessica Fiala’s blog “Speaking of
Dance” on the Walker’s Performing
Arts blog: http://blogs.walkerart.org/
performingarts/2010/02/09/speakingof-dance/
All Performances: Have a cheap drink
and chat with friends at the Balcony Bar
before or after the show ($5 wine, $3
beer, $2 soda)
Anytime: Voice your opinion—and read
others at blogs.walkerart.org/performingarts
Miroku
Choreography, set design,
lighting design, costume design:
Saburo Teshigawara
Solo dance: Saburo Teshigawara
Music Compilation: Neil Griffiths,
Kei Miyata, Saburo Teshigawara
Technical Coordination/lighting:
Sergio Pessanha
Sound: Tim Wright
Stage Manager: Markus Both
Wardrobe/Choreographic assistant:
Rihoko Sato
Duration: 60 minutes
Premiere : December 8, 2007 at New National
Theatre Tokyo
Production: KARAS/New National Theatre
Tokyo
Production, touring: Epidemic
Richard Castelli, Rossana Di Vincenzo,
Florence Berthaud, Pierre Laly
About KARAS from the company
KARAS was formed in 1985 with Saburo
Teshigawara and Kei Miyata. The group’s
aim was to search for a ‘new
form of beauty.’ Dance is a form
of art that consists not only of
dance but also of elements of
art, music, conscience methodology and historical view. KARAS
began considering all such factors through the fusion of physical movement, visual art, rock, and
classical music. Being an artist means
facing the socio-psychological restrictions hidden under an outwardly serene
surface. “Anything goes — doesn’t it ?”
Thus, KARAS believes that art
must not stagnate conserva-
tively. New discoveries must be
made. Rather than art or art methodology springing from conventional ideas established through
history, we hope to act with our
own methods with respect to still
hidden possibilities. What we
discover may be doubts or questions. We
want to express these through action.
About Saburo Teshigawara
Saburo Teshigawara began his unique
creative career in 1981 in his native Tokyo
after studying visual arts and classic ballet. In 1985, he formed KARAS with Kei
Miyata and began group choreography.
Since then, he and KARAS have been
invited every year to perform in major
international cities around the world.
In addition to solo performances and
his work with KARAS, Teshigawara
has also been receiving international
attention as a choreographer/director. He has been commissioned by
many international ballet companies such as the Paris Opera to create repertoire pieces for the company.
Teshigawara has likewise received
increasing international attention in
the visual arts field, with art exhibitions,
films/videos as well as set, lighting, and
costume design for all his performances.
Teshigawara’s keenly honed sculptural
sensibilities and powerful 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, Teshigawara
has been involved in many education
projects. Recent young members of the
company KARAS are from Dance of Air,
an educational project that presents a
performance as a culmination of a yearlong workshop process, produced by
the New National Theatre Tokyo. S.T.E.P.
(Saburo Teshigawara Education Project)
started in 1995 with partners in the UK,
also in the same style as Dance of Air. In
2004, Teshigawara was selected as the
mentor of dance for The Rolex Mentor
and Protégé Arts Initiative to work for
one year with a chosen protégé. Since
2006, he has been a professor at the
Department of Expression Studies, the
College of Contemporary Psychology,
St. Paul’s (Rikkyo) University in Japan,
where he teaches movement theory and
conducts workshops. Through these
various projects, Teshigawara continues
to encourage and inspire young dancers, together with his creative work.
Highlights of Teshigawara’s Work
Obsession (2009)
A duet dance performed by Saburo
Teshigawara and Rihoko Sato, inspired
by Salvador Dali’s/Luis Bunuel’s 1929
Surrealist film Un Chien Andalou.
Miroku (2007)
Solo piece created at the New National
Theatre Tokyo in December 2007.
Miroku is based on the spirit to see
the present from the eye of the future.
For Teshigawara, dance is the continuity of the future completing each second before us. The blue-box set stage
changes phase every moment with the
magic of Teshigawara’s lighting design.
Glass Tooth (2006)
Accompanied by prominent KARAS
dancers, Teshigawara performs on a massive square made of countless broken
glass pieces. Pieces of glass reflect the
fragment of time. Bodies confront, waver
in unquantifiable contradictions, and
amplify and explore unknown aesthetics.
GREEN / Raj Packet (2003)
Emanating from the performance Raj
Packet, and originally created for the
Montpellier Dance Festival in 2003, GREEN
was presented at the Civitanovadanza
Festival in Italy in 2004. Performance by
Teshigawara, KARAS dancers, guest performers and live animals. Live music performed by SAND on a huge green pastoral stage. Raj Packet received the Dance
Critic Award, the Nimura Dance Award
and Asahi Performing Arts Award in Japan.
Oxygen (2002)
The company created the site-specific project Oxygen in September
2002
for
the
Klangspuren
Festival, Schwaz (Austria) and the
Transart Festival in Bolzano (Italy), a
joint project for Teshigawara, KARAS
and the Austrian composer Wolfgang
Mitterer and his string ensemble.
The performance took place in a cattle
market.
KARAS Contact Information
KARAS Tokyo, 1-26-3, Kujiraoka #2 bldg 3/4F,
Kameido, Koto-ku, Tokyo, 136-0071, Japon
Tel : +81 3 3682 7441/ Fax : +81 3 3682 7472
[email protected]
http://www.st-karas.com/en/
The Rise of Contemporary Dance
as a Departure from Butoh
Japan’s dance scene (aside from traditional classical dance and folk dance)
can be classified into four categories:
classical ballet; modern dance; Butoh,
which has been extremely well received
overseas and which was founded in
1959 by Tatsumi Hijikata; and contemporary dance, in which individual artists depart from existing methods and
traditions and pursue original physical expression… even though [Butoh]
dancers are prominent in the dance
world, the genre of Butoh as a whole
is no longer giving rise to a succession
of new talent. Instead, we see contemporary dance arising to take the place
of Butoh. Contemporary dancers take
the possibilities for physical expression cultivated by Butoh and develop
them in new ways. For example, Saburo
Teshigawara [is] a post-Butoh talent who
has attracted a great deal of attention.
—Exerpt from The Rise of Contemporary Dance
as a Departure from Butoh by Eiko Tsuboike
December 2004. Click for entire article: www.
performingarts.jp/E/overview_art/0411/1.html
Interview with Saburo Teshigawara
Maimi Sato: I would like to go back
for a moment to ask you what types
of things you were doing when
you were starting out as an artist.
Saburo Teshigawara: In my early career
I spent the longest time studying ballet.
After that I participated in various events
and once every three months I worked
with video artists and people who were
doing rock-ish noise to present work
at the Antenna 21 space in Tokyo’s
Shibuya district. That was around 1984.
MS: At the time, the term contemporary dance didn’t exist in Japan, so what
did you call the things you were doing?
ST: We called it “moving works.” I didn’t
like the term modern dance and I didn’t
think of it as butoh. I liked theater too
and often went to the small theater
called Kyu-Shinkukan Gekijo, which
was in a converted factory building. I
danced there under bare light bulbs in
the entrance hall, and I think that may
have been my maiden performance.
MS: You came to the attention of the
world when you entered a work titled
Kaze No Sentan (La Pointe du Vent)
at the 1986 Bagnolet International
Choreography Competition. It was a
work that shocked and stunned many
people because it took as its motif
the seemingly simple process of falling or crumbling down and then rising again. This was shocking because
dance has always been an exercise in
balance and neither ballet nor modern dance had ever permitted falling,
or equated falling with failure. When
I saw that repetition of falling and rising again, I felt that I was seeing something I had never seen before, a new
language of dance, a new form of
dance vocabulary. How did you come
to conceive of that form of movement?
ST: As I have often said, meeting Kei
Miyata [co-founder of KARAS] was an
important part of it. At the time, we
were doing long workshops where we
would spend hours doing the same
movements over and over. Miyata
disliked dance and didn’t have experience in dance. But she had a very
strong desire to do some form of physical expression. And since she had no
[dance] technique, she didn’t have a
basis for movement. That gave me the
idea of trying to approach movement
by first making the body empty and
“feeling from within the [empty] body.”
So, when I proposed, “An empty body
would crumble and fall, wouldn’t it?,"
Miyata immediately understood intuitively what I was saying and she just
went blank, as if suddenly deflated,
and she crumbled to the ground. And,
it wasn’t a crumbling from the legs, but
a crumbling from the head. And it was
incredibly beautiful to watch. Her body
collapsed so smoothly and beautifully,
it was like watching a slow-motion film
of a giant building collapsing. And
it had such a material sense that you
could almost see the clouds of dust
and smoke rising as she collapsed. That
made me think, “This is not movement,
it is shitsukan [a Japanese expression
that includes both “sense of material” and “material quality/qualities"].
In this way, Miyata has been the source
of all kinds of imagination for me, and
our techniques of expression are things
that Miyata and I have created through
the medium of her body... [and are] all
based on an initial change in consciousness or sensibility that enables the per-
son to become a body with a different
“material quality” or a different “material sense,” and then that becomes
movement. And that gives birth to specific body lines [of movement]. When
I saw Miyata crumble to the ground, I
saw a clear embodiment of the process,
that journey if you will, and I thought
it was beautiful… Dance is not a form
for the purpose of communicating
information. What is important with
dance is whether it is alive or not. That
is what I felt when I met Miyata in the
1980s, and I knew from that time that
I didn’t want to do dance that relied
on form, formalized dance if you will.”
—Interview with Saburo Teshigawara by Maimi
Sato August 2008. Read the complete interview
at The Japan Foundation's website Performing
Arts Network Japan www.performingarts.jp/E/
art_interview/0808/2.html
Upcoming local opportunities
for Choreographers
Choreographers’ Evening auditions
The Walker Art Center is pleased to present the 38th Annual Choreographers’
Evening, curated by Susana di Palma,
November 27, 2010 at 7pm and 9:30pm.
Auditions are held by appointment
only, in the Walker Art Center’s McGuire
Theater; July 29-31. We are not accepting audition requests right now but times
will become available in early July. Check
the Walker website or audition line after
July 5th for specific dates and times.
For more information please call the
audition line: 612.375.7550.
Momentum: New Dance Works 2011
Request for Proposals for Momentum:
New Dance Works 2011 now available.
The series will run July 14-16 and July
21-23, 2011 at the Southern Theater.
Purpose of Series: The Momentum
dance series was created to promote
the work of an exciting new generation of dance and dance-theater creators in Minnesota. The series enables
innovative, under-recognized choreographers to have their work presented by the Walker Art Center and the
Southern Theater as well as provide
professional development opportunities facilitated by the co-presenters.
Momentum seeks out applicants from
a full range of styles, cultures, aesthetics, and approaches that represent contemporary dance in the world today.
For eligibility requirements, official
guidelines with the complete RFP and
application information, go to http://
media.walkerart.org/pdf/Momentum_
Request_For_Proposals_2011.pdf.
Applications due: Friday, May 7, 2010
by 4:00 pm to the Southern Theater
Momentum: New Dance Works 2011
is a partnership between Walker Art
Center and the Southern Theater, with
support from the Jerome Foundation.
Upcoming events at Walker
John Jasperse Company
Truth, Revised Histories, Wishful
Thinking, and Flat Out Lies
May 20, 8 pm
$18 ($15 members)
May 21 & May 22, 8 pm
$25 ($21 members)
McGuire Theater
One of America’s most astute and influential innovators trains his keen eye on
the idea of veracity—and the lack thereof—in this exploration of the often fluid
boundaries between fantasy and reality.
By juxtaposing varied styles of dance,
performance, and music in a collage that
bounces between the sincere and the
ironic, John Jasperse asks us to examine what we believe, what we don’t, and
why. Seasoned with his distinct humor,
Truth features movement for six performers and music composed by Hahn
Rowe for a chamber ensemble (Michelle
Kinney, cello; Angelique Gaudette,
viola; Nicolas Gaudette, bass; and
Melissa Mathews, violin) and electronics.
For tickets and more information visit:
performingarts.walkerart.org
Upcoming events at Northrop
SOLO: 1X2
April 29, 7:30 pm
$20 - $40
Northrop
SOLO: 1X2 is a documentary film celebrating the intense partnership between six
dancers and their choreographers as they
work together to create six extraordinary
solo dances. Internationally famous dance
artists including Nora Chipaumire, Susan
Marshall, and Carla Maxwell comment
about the nature of dance and, in particular, the nature of solo work throughout
the film. They form a bridge that relates
the personal stories of our dancers to the
international world of dance in general.
Post screening there will be a discussion with the directors and dancers.
Tickets: northrop.umn.edu
Nora Chipaumire
lions will roar, swans will fly, angels will
wrestle heaven, rains will break: gukurahundi
A self exiled artist and Bessie Award
winner, Chipaumire is known for her
brave, transnational work that investigates cultural, political, economical, and
technological identities of African contemporary life. Teaming up with dancer
Souleymane Badolo and master musician and poet Thomas Mapfumo (with
his band The Blacks Unlimited), lions...
is a dynamic hour-long performance of
live music, dance, and projected video.
For more information or to buy tickets
visit: northrop.umn.edu
Nora
April 27, 3:15 pm
April 28, 6:55 pm
St. Anthony Main Theatre
A film screening of the African short film
about choreographer/performer Nora
Chipaumire, who will be present at the
April 28 showing. The screening is part
of the 28th Annual Minneapolis-St. Paul
International Film Festival (April 15-30).
Full information, including tickets, show
times is available at www.mspfilmfest.org/
MMX. For further inquiries contact Ryan
Oestreich at Minnesota Film Arts,
612-331-7563 and [email protected].
May 8, 7:30 pm
$5 ($3 for students & Fringe Festival button holders)
Bell Museum of Natural History
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Walker Acknowledgments
Support for Miroku provided by the Japan
Foundation through the Performing Arts JAPAN
Program, the Agency for Cultural Affairs of
Japan, and Producers’ Council members Sage
and John Cowles.
mation about the Producers’ Council, please
contact the Walker’s development office at
612.375.7642 or [email protected]
Northrop Acknowledgments
The Northrop Dance Season is funded in part by
a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board,
through an appropriation by the Minnesota
State Legislature, a grant from the National
Endowment for the Arts, and private funders.
AGENCY FOR CULTURAL AFFAIRS
Additional support is generously provided
by Engaging Dance Audiences: A Program
of Dance/USA, funded by the Doris Duke
Charitable Foundation and The James Irvine
Foundation.
Walker Performing Arts Supporters
The Walker’s Performing Arts programs are
generously supported with funds from the Doris
Duke Charitable Foundation through the Doris
Duke Endowment Fund, the William and Nadine
McGuire Commissioning Fund, The McKnight
Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation,
and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Walker Art Center Producers’ Council
Performing Arts programs and commissions at
the Walker are generously supported by members of the Producers’ Council: Russell Cowles;
Sage and John Cowles; Nor Hall and Roger Hale;
King’s Fountain/Barbara Watson Pillsbury and
Henry Pillsbury; Emily Maltz; Dr. William W. and
Nadine M. McGuire; Leni and David Moore, Jr.;
Josine Peters; Mike and Elizabeth Sweeney; and
Frances and Frank Wilkinson. For more infor-
Northrop Dance at the University of Minnesota
proudly thanks their many individual Friends of
Northrop Dance donors whose contributions
make programming possible. Their gifts bring
awe-inspiring dance troupes to our stage and
support our refreshed vision of transforming
campus and community through culture. For
more information about Friends of Northrop
Dance, please visit the Donate page at northrop.
umn.edu or call the Northrop Ticket Office at
612-624-2345.
Walker Art Center Staff
Philip Bither, McGuire Senior Curator
Julie Voigt, Senior Program Officer
Doug Benidt, Associate Curator
Michèle Steinwald, Program Manager
Emily Taylor, Performing Arts Assistant
Jesse Leaneagh, Performing Arts Intern
Crystal Meisinger, Performing Arts Intern
Ashley Thimm, House Manager
Associate Director, Events and Media
Production: Ben Geffen
Production Manager: Pearl Rea
Crew Chief: Rob Mills
Lighting Supervisor: Jon Kirchhofer
Audio Supervisor: Brent Alwin
Deck Carpenter: Andrew Wagner
Videographer: Andy Underwood-Bultmann
Electricians/Stagehands: Christian Gaylord,
Aaron Anderson, Brian McClear,
Rebecca Denny, Ben Sulzbach
Wardrobe/Stagehand: Tiffany Clem
Stagehands: Kyle Waites, Mike Steskal,
Lindsay Woolward
Northrop Concerts and
Lectures Staff
Administration:
Ben Johnson, Director of Concert & Lectures
Sally Dischinger, Operations Director
Sarah Thompson, External Relations Manager
Robin Sauerwein, Business Manager
Phyllis Messenger, Grants Consultant
Mike Mudge, House Manager
Marketing:
Cari Hatcher, Marketing and Publicity Director
Käri Sivula, Graphic Designer
Sam Gaard, Web Manager
Cassie Broeckert, Marketing Assistant
Ticket Office:
Holly Radis-McCluskey, Audience Services
Manager
Dan Wozney, Data Manager
Tom Archibald, Event Manager / Group Sales
Candy Lord, Accountant
Stage:
Justin Burke, Stage Manager
Mike Damman, Stage Manager
The Walker Art Center’s Dance Season is sponsored by
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