Background
in acrobatics, ballet, and martial arts. Spent three years in Japan and Chorea.
Studied with different taoist and buddhist teachers. Student of the world-famed
and now almost 100-year old butoh-dancer Kazuo Ohno. Former participant of Body
Weather Laboratory by Min Tanaka, as well as student of Iwana Masaki and Natshu
Nakashima in Japan. Has received classes of the French director Bernard Colin
and the Japanese actor Joshi Oida, member of Peter Brooks' company in France.
In Denmark, she was one of the first exponents of butoh dance.
As
choreographer:
Anita Saij has through a period of more than twenty
years developed her own style based on former experiences. She has received attention
and international recognition as a deep and personally engaging artist, who with
a unique dramatic talent has demonstrated the ability and courage of breaking
with conventional theatre. Her work reaches further than the limits of dance as
we see it in her cooperations with original artists, such as the Finnish shouting
choir Mieskuoro Huutajat, performer of Spanish male acting group La Fura Del Baus,
artists of the French new circus Archaos, musicians of the German punk-rockband
Einsturzende Neubauten, and the Greek /American cult-operasinger Diamanda Galas.
All have participated in the performances of Theater Dance Lab. Furthermore Anita
Saij has made several dance videos with the French film and video artist Luc Riolon
as well as Riot and Rosa.
Of more traditional character she has made choreographies for the Royal Theater Ballet Festival Waves, ICMc/International Computer Music Composition and a solo choreography made for Hotel Pro Formas Opera/Operation Orfeo, since 1994 touring world-wide amongst other places to the Sidney Opera House. Both theatres has bought the rights of choreography.
The most well-known of Theater Dance Labs performances is Fireflies, The Blue Cabaret, Thunderbirds, Katarsis, Acid Circ and the solos Sovrana and Nightwanderer, see * Dance Lab.
As teacher and educator Anita Saij has given knowledge and new inspiration to several of our present young talents such as Kitt Johnson, Marlene Hertz, Bo Madvig, Tim Feldtmann and Anders Christiansen. Likewise, she has been guest teaching at the institutes House of Dance, Copenhagen and theater schools in Luxembourg and Helsinki. She has given lectures at Hanyang University, Seoul, Faculty of Theater science at Copenhagen University, as well as at Nordic institute of Asian Studies, Copenhagen. Latest she has tought at STS/ the yearly meeting of Samic Theater Artists Union and at the Samic theater, Kiruna, in connection with a research project for the Nordic Theater convention 2002, Torshavn, Faroe Islands.
” My experiences with scenic art, have to be seen in relation to a more holistic and philosophical approach to dance-movement, where the dance is not only an expression of physical moving and acting out emotion, but rather the expression of inner landscapes and bodily nature sharpened by time and culture”.
” Butoh is here the most important enrichment
I have received as an artist, as it embraces the human as a whole, also the irrational,
subconscious, and spiritual aspects of the body, denied and feared by our modern
dance”. Anita Saij
As dancer:
By the end of the eighties, the young Anita Saij sent a shockwave through the
danceworld with the more than three-hour long solo performance Sovrana, by breaking
with all norms of movement with bodily control never before seen , indecency,
baldheaded and dancing with a fish in her mouth. A special kind of cruelty and
beauty far from normal aesthetical conventions, took the breath out of many and
resulted in several years of censorship from critics of one of the Danish newspaper
publishers. Others reacted euforically on this stimulating new way of creating.
In 1990 she was honored by her first prize in Denmark for her stylebreaking work
with sound, light, and choreography, and latest in 1997, she received a price
for the performance Inferno/ Acid Cirq at the great Toolwod Festival in Germany.
43-years
old she re-entered the stage with a solo piece, The Nightwanderer, who once again
showed a continously more physical and grotesque universe of dance. Likewise,
two years later in 2000, in the performance White Monkey, with dancer and anthropologist
Karina Holm, the press wrote: Anita Saij is uninhibited in her charisma. She
still enjoys the disappearing of all beauty, and to wipe the ugliness and the
distorted in the face of the audience.
Information, Anne Middelboe Christensen
Anita Saij has been listed in The Danish Encyclopedia of Women Biographies, as a female artist, who has made Denmark remarkable and interesting through personal engagement and achievement.
© Nordic School of Butoh 2004