This new creation, inspired by Les Sylphides, is choreographer Ryu Suzuki’s exploration of the listening body—a body that doesn’t simply follow music, but inhabits it through weight, breath, and spatial awareness. Rather than illustrating sound, the piece gives form to the act of listening itself, rendered physically.

The score is Roy Douglas’s orchestration of Chopin’s piano works—music once dreamt of as the epitome of ballet blanc. Here, however, it becomes something else: a forest of poetic resistance and silence.

Suzuki’s choreographic language is deeply informed by his ongoing research into the physical and rhythmic qualities of kendama, a traditional Japanese skill toy. The bounce, suspension, sudden halts, and rebalancing inherent in kendama play generate a unique sensibility—one that dissolves the distinction between rhythm and gesture. Music is not something to count; it is something that seeps into the body through shifts in gravity and the subtle spacing of breath.

What unfolds on stage is not a story, nor an explanation, but a dance that exists as a singular encounter—unrepeatable and alive only in the present moment. Drawing from Suzuki’s fascination with “mirror-like trance states” and the poetic sensibility of toy-inspired movement, the work offers a space of resonance, where the audience and the dancers become attuned to the same fragile frequency.

In a world where every movement can be recorded and replicated, Suzuki proposes a quiet resistance: that there is still something sacred, musical, and spiritual in what disappears. And it is through the listening body that this fleeting beauty takes breath.

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