The Man Who Set Manga In Motion
Laura Thompson reports: ‘A show based on the work of Japanese cartoon artist Osamu Tezuka – revered in his homeland as “the god of manga†– is a prospect apparently designed to raise the hackles of anybody wary of contemporary dance. It certainly raised mine. Despite the lofty reputation of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, the half-Flemish, half-Moroccan choreographer whose new creation, “TeZuKa,” is currently in rehearsal in his native Antwerp, I was ready to be baffled by the sight of dancers “becoming†Japanese calligraphy, mimicking strokes of the pen with their bodies, and by the unfamiliar culture of an artist whose best-known character is a robot child named Astro Boy. Yet within a couple of minutes of entering the theatre in Antwerp, all scepticism was blown away.’
