As the first Japanese artist to declare he had AIDS, and the first to use the intimate details of his life creatively in performance, Teiji did much more than just come out: he came out on stage, and to a rapidly growing constituency. He helped found dumb type in 1984 and mold it into a provocatively articulate, acidly witty company of dancers, artists, musicians and performers. He took its agenda of social concerns around the world, making it Japan's most sought-after contemporary performance company.

How will the group survive Teiji's death? This month in Tokyo, dumb type performs their finest and best-known piece, S/N. The performance is dedicated to Teiji's memory and is the first to be staged without him. "Furuhashi played an important part in the work," says Toru Koyamada, dumb type's visual and multimedia artist. "But S/N, as a work in progress, continues to be developed as he intended when he told us he was HIV-positive three years ago."

Others aren't so sure. "It's not just that Teiji was the glue holding dumb type together; he made sense of its technological meanderings," says one Tokyo critic. "Without him, it's just so much avant-garde confusion." Can dumb type ever regain the intellectual dynamism that Teiji brought to each performance, lecture, exhibition and after-hours get-together?

"Furuhashi hated hierarchy, and he didn't think of himself as the group's leader or director," says critic Tadashi Uchino of Tokyo University. The truth, as Teiji's sudden absence will surely demonstrate, is that he was only the first among several equals. Bubu, dumb type's sex worker in residence, has an instinctive stage presence, whether speaking or dancing (and with or without her clothes on). Peter Golightly is an all-round performer with a mean cabaret/drag act, while the fierce Noriko Sunayama and Mayumi Tanaka can strip the flesh off movement and still gnaw away at the bones. dumb type has also recruited a new member--the writer Alfred Birnbaum, well-known for his translations of Haruki Murakami's novels, to inject a little early-morning discipline. "We thought that one of the repercussions of Teiji's death would be that we could start meetings on time, but it's not likely," says Birnbaum. It will be his job to liaise with overseas venues, get the layout to the printer on time, and more.

S/N originally opened with Teiji delivering a speech about identity and tolerance, in a suit with labels reading "Japanese," "male," "homosexual" and "HIV+." His transcendental moment as a drag diva will also survive as an integral part of the production--on video, a medium which dumb type makes consistent creative use of in its work. "Teiji's death is not the end," insists Yoko Takatani, the group's manager. "The ones who are left will start over again." After this month's Tokyo performance, the group plays Kyoto in February, tours overseas in March, and collaborates on a new production, Monkey Business, with the Danish group Proforma to premier in August.

The week before he died, Teiji had talked about the future of the group after his death. "What dumb type does is about more than just my sexuality, my illness or my death. People don't seem to understand that. It's about all our illnesses . . . all our lives."