FESTIVAL/TOKYO

After F/T09 Spring's "blueLion", Tsuyoshi Shirai's first Tokyo performance in over 2 years!

Tsuyoshi Shirai appeared with Kim Itoh + the Glorious Future dance company from 1996 to 2000, and also helped establish Study of Live Works - Baneto. In 2000 at the age of just 24 he won the Bagnolet International Choreography Award and he premiered his solo work "mass, slide, &" in 2004, which won him the Toyota Choreography Award in 2006. Recently, in addition to collaborating with the Arditti String Quartet using the music of John Cage, he has for 2 years running participated in the Kyoto Art Center's Theatre Project.

A miraculous dialogue of space, music and body unweaving in the midst of historical
architecture

"Still life" was first produced at the Kyoto Art Center in 2009 and is now re-invented for F/T in the historical setting of the Auditorium of the Jiyu Gakuen Myonichikan, combining lyrical physicality and music with tranquil space.

The work that can be called his landmark piece is Shirai's previous dance "blueLion", an experiment in choreographing an objectivization and abstraction of the relationship between people, using fellow dancers Masako Terada and Yukio Suzuki. This new work seeks, Shirai says, to portray the faint but sure "something" that occurs the moment dance happens. Through a gaze like that of a painter to his subject, when dance grasps physicality and the intensity and texture of a space, that afterimage paints a picture. Shirai has revealed this new horizon of a dance methodology founded on dance and other people, dance and music, and dance and language.

Along with fresh new faces for his co-performers, including former Noism dancer Naoya Aoki, Minako Suzuki, Kikue Takagi and Hideaki Takeuchi, Shirai will also himself dance for the first time in a long time.