It's hard to imagine Saburo Teshigawara ever coming up with a solo to rival "Absolute Zero," his work currently in production at Setagaya Public Theater.

Teshigawara has pulled off some stunning solo pieces in his time -- it's not easy to beat a four-hour marathon with alive crow -- but this work is a piece of total integrity, so true to the choreographer's own physical expression that it is destined to be the hallmark of his career.

This artist-turned-classical ballet dancer, choreographer, turned-filmmaker and designer-turned-opera director is a complete man of the theater and long regarded overseas as Japan's most complete contemporary aesthete. His work is utterly dramatic, as much for his own choreography on bare stages swathed in black and pinpointed by lights, as for his sparse artistic vision, seen in his work for Bunkamura's recent "Turandot" production, which opens this year's Edinburgh International Festival in August.

A major part of his work overseas is S.T.E.P., the Saburo Teshigawara Education Project with young people in London, run in tandem with the London International Festival of Theatre, the Place Theatre and Karas. He is one of the few successful, professional dancers here to actively involve himself in workshops and teaching -- the norm overseas, but regarded as diluting the desired "professional" image by many in Japan. Karas, the dance company he runs with co-artistic director Kei Miyata, gets top billing overseas and at home. Now, at a time when it would be easy for Teshigawara to rest on his very significant laurels, he is upping the ante.

But if Teshigawara is exceeding expectations and bursting through boundaries it is nowhere as evident as on the stage in this piece. "Absolute Zero" is one of those rare theatrical experiences that demands the entire day. Many productions stand up well to a dinner afterward with friends or a few drinks on the way home; the "Absolute Zero" experience has absolute zero tolerance for the intrusions of the everyday world.

It is a piece in three parts, the first two seemingly an effortless continuity from beginning to end, the final section more compromised. Teshigawara has found a winning formula in putting the more risk-taking sections of his work to the more established scores, often, especially, those sections which could induce restlessness on the part of the audience. Thus "Absolute Zero" opens with an abstract filmed sequence of morning glories, taken from a previous piece of the same name, shaking their frilly heads in negative and positive frames to Baroque music.

It's the lull before the storm, when Teshigawara comes on in clean, definitive poses, arms wheeling around like spirals of seagulls, shaking his throbbing feet and twisting into spins and turns that would bring a dervish to tears of jealousy.

He changes, in "Absolute Zero," from this movement-obsessed will o' the wisp, light and effortless, to patterns of geometric limbs pointing with compass precision in all directions. There's also a stillness, a very brave stillness that takes over the stage and steals over his body like an imagined paralysis.

As with all great choreographers, Teshigawara is showing us something new and unexpected in this piece, but it has more to do with his own gifts as a dancer than any choreographic, even self-imposed, direction. He has previously used his patterns of broken lines and disjointed squirming to indicate a fragility, to deliver a warning about the stressed equilibrium of the body and a mental condition at snapping point. Now his body owns this movement in a way that demonstrates a naturalism. The disjointed patterns, the broken line at wrist, waist and neck have the rhythmic vitality of a displaced worm seeking earth. The delicate, ultra-fast shaking of his small, pointed feet have an animal quality, a deer perhaps, that grows stronger with each section of "Absolute Zero."

It is the central section of this piece which produces the greatest challenges and the greatest rewards, for performer and viewer alike. Danced with Kei Miyata as a detached, helpless puppet figure, this is still, collected and profoundly moving. Again, Teshigawara teams this with a solo piano score, a comfort hook as he layers his slow, dignified patterns. Although there's a fine line between being moved to tears and bored to tears, this quiet, meditative piece flows over the audience like a balm. It calms the breathing of some hundred people into a unison measured rhythm.

This requiem folds silently into the maelstrom of video work created by Karas member Shun Ito, and large frames containing various images that descend from the flies into a stage collage.

There has been a lot of talk about Teshigawara's speed of movement; his spins, particularly, have all the fluidity of ice skating. However impressive his speed and the fractured light which decimates his spinning image may be, though, I think this admiration would be better directed to the power the dancing now gives him. Although the speed honor must now go to young U.S. classical dancer Rasta Thomas, there are few performers who can measure Teshigawara step for expansive step in his own choreography. There's a new ferocity to his enjoyment of movement as he flings himself across the stage, engulfing large pockets of air, or focuses so entirely on the gradual descent of his arm.

The ferocity is what has brought him this far, but it's the focus on the stillness that points the way ahead.