The extraordinary lightness of being a dancer

With Lin Huai-min (林懷民), Taiwan's renowned choreographer as artistic director, the annual Novel Dance (新舞風) series is one of the most anticipated dance events in Taiwan. This year, the Japanese choreographer Saburo Teshigawara is bringing Luminous, one of his most celebrated works, to the National Theater (國家戲劇院) tonight.

Luminous premiered in Tokyo in 2001 and was a hit at the Edinburgh International Festival last year. Teshigawara scored the music and designed the costumes with his long-time collaborator Kei Miyata, who is also a dancer in the performance and composer of the album Absolute Zero, from which the music is drawn.

Teshigawara's idea of dance is the "movement of the senses," which "involves all of a person's consciousness and senses." Body movement is the visible part of this exercise, but there is also an invisible part, which is the reaching out of one sense to another when we are trying to relate to our surroundings.

Teshigawara launched his dance career in 1981 and founded his dance group, Karas, in Tokyo in 1985 after training in the plastic arts and classical ballet. He has choreographed for various European dance companies and has also dabbled in visual arts, film and video. For his own performances, he does scenography design, lighting and costumes.

In Luminous, Teshigawara and his company explore how the human body perceives and adapts to the spatial, visual and acoustic environment. Throughout the show, light "dances" with the performers. Dancers jump in and out of square panels of light. Mirrors create a play of light beams. Spotlights combine with the moving figures in liquid movements. Silhouettes of torsos and legs move eerily in light-boxes. When these stage devices are not present, the dancers become the light in florescent costumes, against dark backgrounds. A nun-like figure is suspended in mid-air and underneath are green figures seemingly trapped between the pages of a giant book that opens and closes. The brooding voice of English actor Evroy Deer tells a bewildering story about dark doves. In the second half of the show, Teshigawara performs a long solo to set up the mood for the highlight of the evening -- his duet with Stuart Jackson.

Teshigawara was inspired to create this piece after seeing an exhibition in London on the origin of painting. Legend has it that an ancient Greek couple held candles against a wall to create silhouettes of each other, which they then drew.

"Light has always been integral to dance, but why it is so became a big puzzle for me," Teshigawara said. This was partly answered by his collaboration with Jackson, a blind and mentally challenged participant in the choreographer's STEP workshop for under-privileged teenagers in London.

"The blind do not dance to an external light but to their inner light. They become bodies of light when dancing," Teshigawara said.

"[Jackson] can't walk in straight lines. He was like an infant. But his greatest fear was putting his hands up toward the sky, which he could not sense with touch. For him, the world is what is touchable."

At the workshop, Teshigawara also trained Jackson in breathing techniques. "We used the stretch between inhale and exhale as a measure of movement .... His movements are thus not measured physically. He balances and gauges spatial distance by