January 2018 Mariko Sanjo
How do I want to be?
For more than 80 years, I have constantly thought about this while moving my body and taking action.
With my body wanting to feel the fear of flying to
a place of no return, I have kept on dancing.
Now I am wondering how I should approach
“the moon’s path,” which is getting closer and closer to me. Should I run, waver, or dance?
I always think. I wonder what sort of sound I would hear on my way to the end of my life.
Would I also hear that wind that was blowing in Israel?
Every night, when I fall asleep,
I always trace my slight sense of hearing,
which is always the last to shut down.
Profile
A life in Dance
Mariko Sanjo was born in 1933 in Japan. While her ancestors were Samurai and her mother teaches the classical art of flower arrangement in Tokyo, she had found her life work in the Western art form of modern dance. Mariko was trained by Hiroshi Ohno, a disciple of Baku Ishii, a pioneer of modern dance in Japan, and by Takaya Eguchi, an another master teacher who studied with Mary Wigman.
Since establishing her own studio in Tokyo in 1952, Mariko had become one of the major figures in dance in Japan and, increasingly, in the U.S., where she had performed and taught.
Ms. Sanjo came to the U.S. to study with Martha Graham, Louis Horst, Jose Limon, Alvin Ailey and Donald McKayle in 1962 and she appeared as a protagonist in McKayle's Legendary Landscape at the Hunter College, and premiered Ailey's Labyrinth and Suspension at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the spring of 1963.
Returning to Japan, Mariko gave her recitals in Tokyo in 1964 and 1965 which led to her receiving the Music and Ballet Critics Award, the first woman ever to be so honored. She made history in 1966 when NHK, the prestigious national television network in Japan, presented Mariko and her company in an hour-long program featuring her major work Electra. This official recognition of modern dance in the land of Noh and Kabuki gave a historic stimulus to the movement in Japan.
In 1980, she was invited to teach and perform at the International Sommerrakademie des Tanzes in Cologne, Germany. Her awards and honors had been too numerous to mention.
Not only merely a striking dancer, Mariko had choreographed more than thirty works to critical acclaim. Her career had blossomed as a teacher of choreography as well, both in New York at City College and her private studio near Washington Square, and throughout Japan. Her Zen heritage ーwith its commitment to concentration and its intensive master-pupil relationshipーhad won her a developed following of theater professionals willing to accept and embrace the discipline of dance.
Ms. Sanjo's signature piece, Bird, and Jomon, VoiceI~VII, Dance Opinion were performed in New York, Tokyo, Cologne, San Fransisco, Saul, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Nagoya and Osaka, Japan.
