Saburo Teshigawara, Waltz, The Coronet

Saburo Teshigawara, Waltz, The Coronet Theatre, March 19, 2025

It is always going to be challenging to see a performance by an artist with the degree of mastery of Saburo Teshigawara and to find it doesn’t fit any easy classification. In the case of the UK première of Waltz, presented with impeccable programming at the Coronet, the music is familiar — with a strong romantic Russian flavour — but the choreographic use of gesture derives from the consciousness of an artist whole cultural and philosophical sensibility gives the waltz an unfamiliar context.
If you play the thirteen waltzes Teshigawara has chosen for Waltz one after the other there is, after the blustering opener of Johann Strauss’s Frühlingstimmen Walzer, a decidedly melancholic feeling. Teshigawara clearly feels drawn into this kind of brooding contemplation. The succession of waltz sequences gives the work the feel of frames in a choreographic film, from tightly wrought close-ups to expansive track shots. The music itself also suggests a cinematic treatment; alongside waltzes by Eugen Doga and Peter Gundry, even those of Chopin and Tchaikovsky sound as if they have been written for the cinema.
With two people on stage performing solos and duets, there are inevitably intimations of a narrative, snapshots of memory and experience. The waltz thus becomes a metaphor for life, one that has a regular rhythm and infinite melodies. In its social form the waltz is a partnership, and Teshigawara dances with his long-term partner, Rihoko Sato, but Waltz is an opportunity to use the familiar rhythm to channel more than the male-female relationship: through their contrasting but deeply complementary movement styles, what comes across is the relationship between melancholy and exuberance. Teshigawara, dressed in black, seems often introspective, a Hamlet figure afflicted with existentialist thoughts that take him ever closer to the edge of darkness. At one point he stamps his feet and bangs his fists against the wall like a petulant prince reacting to some nightmarish vision; it is as if he is trying to erase the rhythm of the waltz rather than reinforce it.

Following the music’s melodic line with his rapid changes of direction and his filigree arm and hand movements, Teshigawara is in contrast to Sato, dressed in white, who digs deep into the pulsing rhythms of the waltz for her whirlwind of life-giving affirmation. Despite the intimacy of their relationship, Teshigawara and Sato don’t ever touch; the significance of events portrayed exists within the beautifully calibrated space between them, with Teshigawara’s use of light suggesting physical and psychological boundaries. Musicologist Michel Schneider said of the voice that it is a gateway towards the unconscious (‘La voix est une porte vers l’inconscient’). With Teshigawara it could be said that the gateway towards the unconscious lies in his use of gesture. His limbs, precisely articulated around a dynamic core, carry the emotion of his dance far more than his face, which he wears like a mask, giving him the uncanny quality of a puppet with an extraordinarily expressive body. This in turn heightens the inexorable sense of fate hanging over Waltz. It is Sato’s autonomous, fluid presence, a headstrong muse swirling around Teshigawara with her long, thick white hair that completes but never finishes her movements, that seems to will him to life and, when she collapses, to nearly lose hers in the process. She elicits the ecstasy of the waltz to Teshigawara’s often tortuous indecision. It is significant that while Teshigawara opens Waltz, it is Sato who finishes it alone on stage in the dying of the light.

It is the kind of performance, like The Idiot from 2019, that keeps a tenacious grip of the imagination and won’t let go.
While the program does not specify who choreographed Waltz (I wasn’t able to attend the post-show talk to find out), it seems likely, given their unique styles of movement, that both Teshigawara and Sato had a hand in its creation and are jointly responsible for the remarkable synergy between them on stage. Sato is named ‘Artistic Collaborator’ but Teshigawara is listed as responsible for ‘direction, lighting design and costume’. It is perhaps his way of concentrating the creative vision as sharply as possible, but when the director is also performer he cannot see what the audience sees. There were two moments in the production that may have suffered because of this: an indeterminate hiatus towards the end of the performance — do we applaud or don’t we? — and the ending itself, which detracted from Sato’s richly deserved place alone on stage.