The Idiot Review – a Real Reworking of a Russian Classic

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The Idiot review – a real reworking of a Russian classic

Posted on 24th Mar 201924th Mar 2019 If you brought Dostoevsky back into a room to ask if his novel, The Idiot, could be considered an ‘embodied text’, I wonder what his answer would be.

Renowned Japanese choreographer Saburo Teshigawara takes Dostoevsky’s treasured favourite; casting himself as the eponymous, pathetically innocent the “idiot” Prince Myshkin, with his life- long partner Rihoko Sato as his restrained love-interest Nastasya Filippovna.

What unfurls onstage is, I presume, as close as you can get to embodying a text such as The Idiot. The Idiot has a convoluted plot bestrewn with Dostoevsky’s own frustration with 19th century Russia’s social codes, Christianity and indeed his personal experience with epilepsy. Teshigawara’s erudite reinterpretation enables these complexities to engender; and, rather satisfyingly, does this without being tempted to create a piece which seeks to resolve all the complications Dostoevsky left intentionally untied.

The choreography in Teshigawara’s The Idiot embodies and articulates the text’s and its characters’ complexity. Dressed in white, Teshigawara’s movement is paradoxical. It is regularly irregular. With nimble footwork and ﬂicks of the wrist, he is emotionally robotic, stopping and starting and then repeating. The paranoia of having a seizure overhangs Teshigawara’s choreogaphy; Myshkin moves in perpetual uncertainty, unsure when he will slip into a world where consciousness as we know it does not exist.

Rihoko Sato as Nastasya Filippovna is a complete wonder. We, the audience, join Myshkin to all become enraptured by her repetitive, undulating arm sequences. Whilst the effect of her rising and falling wears off in the places it shouldn’t; it still serves as a parallel to Nastasya’s character – as a good woman whose purity is marred by the society she lives in.

Inevitably, Teshigawara’s embodied text falls short at times. Although he encapsulates Myshkin’s interiority and therefore his suffering, losing concentration even for a split second made it hard to get back into The Idiot’s rhythm. Although we can read into it and say the piece is merely mirroring the tidal, up-and-down movement of human experience and consciousness, the result made the overall effect seem somewhat diluted and tired.

But in the grand scheme of things, isn’t movement supposed to reﬂect who we are as humans, how we behave, how we embody? If we were all without imperfection and if everything was uncomplicated, how true to life would everything be? We are supposed to feel, empathise and learn from art, particularly how it teaches us what it means to be human. Even if sometimes it is a little disappointing.

At the Print Room Coronet, Notting Hill until 30 March. Photo: Abe Akihito

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The Idiot – Print Room at the Coronet Author: Marianna Meloni in Dance, Reviews 25 March 2019 0 Comments

Summary Excellent Japanese dance virtuoso Saburo Teshigawara creates a masterpiece that cannot be simply taken at face value. His version of The Idiot is a bare thread that must be woven with our imagination. User Rating: Be the first one !

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot revolves around Prince Myshkin (Saburo Teshigawara), a young man who returns to Russia, having spent four years in a Swiss clinic to treat his epilepsy. Soon, his good spirit and innocence clash with the dirt and evil of the local aristocracy. This is represented on stage in the contrast between the Prince’s pristine costume and the stark, if gorgeous, gowns of Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova (Rihoko Sato), the unworthy woman with whom he becomes increasingly obsessed.

In this hour-long dance piece, which Teshigawara has also directed and choreographed, the various scenes might be easier to interpret for those who are familiar with Dostoevsky’s 19th century novel, but are equally enjoyable for those who aren’t. Regardless of its literary inspiration, this is a beautiful and strongly evocative work, representative of the choreographer’s genius and multidisciplinary accomplishments. Most remarkably, his creative supervision extends as far as the direction, lighting, costume and musical design.

Now in his sixties, this Japanese master started his training in the 80’s as a painter and sculptor, as well as a classical ballet dancer, with a plastic awareness which is reflected in his physicality and style. The Prince’s reverence for Nastasya is portrayed with delicate, barely perceptible gestures, whereas his stifling epileptic fits break out with repeated muscle clenching.

After a long courtship, where the woman appears oblivious to the Prince’s desperate longing, their chemistry explodes on the notes of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Waltz No. 2, when they frantically circle around the stage, fluttering like butterflies but hardly touching each other.

When the classical motif fades into a minimal electronic tune, a sapping game of catch and release asks for all the dancers’ stamina to depict the power of emotions. Their bodies burn on stage like flames. Eventually, the Prince gives up, confused and defeated, unable to break through the darkness that envelopes him, whilst Nastasya fades in the background.

A stunning performance is welcomed by the audience with an eager and prolonged applause. As with some of the best-known artworks, Teshigawara’s rendition of The Idiot cannot simply just be taken at face value, but has to be absorbed at a deeper level, with its multi-layered visual and musical messages. Quintessentially minimalistic and stripped down to only two characters, it offers a bare thread which we’re compelled to weave with our own interpretation and feelings.

The Idiot danced by Teshigawara Saburo and Sato Rihoko Review by Alice Baldock

The Idiot danced by Teshigawara Saburo and Sato Rihoko Print Room at the Coronet 20-30 March 2019

In the almost-darkness, there is a flicker of something beast-like, the sound of scurrying. A whisper of a tail, a tail too long to belong to anything other than something monstrous. Later, we discover it is a rat, a huge, humanoid rat. But to begin, we are led away from this terrifying presence, quickly forgetting about him as Teshigawara Saburo, in a gleaming white suit, becomes visible. He turns his face to look at something distant and horrifying, out there among the audience. He is looking directly at me.

I wonder, though, if everyone feels that way, if Teshigawara is fixing his gaze on each individual, somehow. There is a moment of intimacy between each occupied seat and the figure gazing up at them.

This scene dissolves and gives way to an hour-long exploration of a hauntingly-flawed relationship. It is the driving relationship in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot: the romance between Prince Myshkin and Nastasya Filippovna. The storyline is a distilled interpretation of the novel, and those desiring a translation of the plot’s intricacies into movement may be disappointed. But as an exploration of two humans, and their fleeting coming together, it more- than delivers. The two main dancers – who would be the only dancers, if it were not for the mysterious rat-figure – are danced by Teshigawara and Sato Rihoko. The two have worked and danced together countless times, meaning there is an easy synchronicity to their movements, even as they move separately. Such an off-stage connection certainly helps create a convincing relationship on-stage. Filippovna, danced by Sato. captivates Teshigawara’s Prince with the classic combination of beauty and aloofness, a textbook Ice Queen. Her costume helps craft her outward character; always in black, and in splaying skirts that add to her glamour. Yet the essence of her attraction is communicated by her fluidity whilst in motion. Her movement-lexis is of constant turning motions. She moves so fast that motion-capture images of her hands seem to drag in the air, and she never continues in the same direction for more than a few steps. The effect upon both the Prince and the audience, is bedazzlement.

A cutting juxtaposition between the movement-style of Prince Myshkin and Filippovna both adds to her glamorous aura and reveals the extent of the Prince’s flaws. Sato shines the most in the scenes where both dancers are on stage. Yet as Prince Myshkin, Teshigawara is at his best when performing a danced rendition of an epileptic seizure. This is fitting, as Myshkin’s epilepsy was one of the core concerns of Dostoevsky; he too suffered from the condition. Teshigawara’s exploration of this builds from a combination of movement, lighting, and music. A glowing yellow light shuts out the rest of the world, and the music transforms into half-stutters and incomplete melodies. Teshigawara seems to isolate each fragment of his body, down to the space between the knuckles of each finger bone. Perhaps repeated for a little too long to hold the audience’s interest, but a refreshing exposition of the ways that a human body can move.

Teshigawara’s Prince Myshkin is brought to life by Filippovna. At first, he follows her as if without choice, whilst she fails, perhaps refuses, to acknowledge his hungry eyes and earnest steps. The moment where she does accept him is one of the two moments in the whole piece where they physically touch. He takes her arm and walks with her briefly, they draw apart. The moment is fleeting, the movements unambitious, yet it was perhaps the climax of the piece. For a moment, they relax into one another, and there is a glimpse at a potential union, a potential future happiness. Yet, they separate. Their duets thereafter depart from a conventional duet. The dancers don’t touch, they don’t look at each other, they are not carrying out the same movements with their muscles. They are dancing together, but at first one thinks they might be in separate worlds. There are no giant lifts, no pas de deux of any variety. Yet Teshigawara creates the impression that these individuals are undeniably dancing together. Myshkin’s movements become a bit less stunted as he trails Filippovna, and they both carry out similar kinds of movements, a half-beat out of synch. Later, Sato moves in a jerking way, taking on a little of the Prince’s stresses and hardships. Their relationship is one without touch, despite the tactility of dance.

Unlike many contemporary choreographers, Teshigawara chose not to play with levels in this piece. The dancers do not jump. They barely leave the floor, nor do they get closer to the ground aside from a few brief instances. Lighting and staging are kept to the minimum too. This choice has the potential to become uninteresting, yet the simplicity of his use of levels certainly draws attention back to the relationship between Prince Myshkin and Filippovna. Meanwhile, the lack of any kind of place-markers on stages means that the choreography had to work harder to convey a sense of setting. The fact that it was possible to follow this – you can see the sense of wonder as Myshkin arrives in an invisible St Petersburg, for instance – shows testament to the skill of the dancers and their use of expression. The use of light to control the space, too, indicates a thoughtful light-design which pulled the audience towards certain moments, and suddenly threw the stage wide at others.

The piece is certainly not a full-length translation of Dostoevsky’s novel. Yet, the pieces Teshigawara has chosen to extract from the novel are explored in depth. We see the fascination of a wonder-struck man in a large city, his captivation with a woman, his struggles with a difficult-to-control condition. We see the dynamics and intimacies of a relationship; how two bodies come to orbit one-another, and how this falls apart.

It is the first time in almost a decade that Teshigawara has brought a piece to London and is showing until Saturday 30 March at the Print Room at The Coronet, Notting Hill. Step-by-step guide to dance: Saburo Teshigawara and Karas | Stage | theguardian.com 03/10/13 17:34

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Step-by-step guide to dance: Saburo Teshigawara and Karas Choreographer and performer whose troupe dance along the edge of physical expression, forging a sensory style all their own

Sanjoy Roy theguardian.com, Wednesday 15 June 2011 13.59 BST

In short

His company's name means "crow", but Saburo Teshigawara is more of a magpie – bringing together different elements of movement, text, design and lighting into performances of symbols and senses.

Backstory

Born in Tokyo in 1953, Teshigawara studied visual arts and sculpture before beginning ballet at the age of 20. Though admiring its technique, he felt dislocated from the style, and in 1981 began to experiment with more interdisciplinary projects, working with videomakers, "noise artists" and performance art in search of what he called "a new form of beauty".

In 1985 he founded his company Karas with Kei Miyata. With no formal dance training, but a keen interest in physical expression, Miyata had quickly become a key artistic partner for Teshigawara – and she remains so to this day. The company took off in 1986, when their entry for the Bagnolet international choreography competition sparked considerable international interest. Soon, they were dividing their time between Tokyo and European bases, first in France and then in Frankfurt. International tours increased, and Teshigawara also received commissions from well-established companies, including the Frankfurt Ballet, Nederlands Dans Theater, Paris Opera Ballet http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2011/jun/15/dance-saburo-teshigawara-karas/print Page 1 sur 5 Step-by-step guide to dance: Saburo Teshigawara and Karas | Stage | theguardian.com 03/10/13 17:34

and Geneva Ballet. Alongside his own performance work, Teshigawara also put considerable energy into the company's educational wing, STEP (Saburo Teshigawara Education Project), founded in 1995; it gained acclaim for its choreographic work with blind people.

Teshigawara's creative scope goes a long way beyond dance and movement: often, he'll do the stage, costume, set and lighting design too. He has also worked in opera (Turandot at the 1999 Edinburgh festival, for which he was director, designer and choreographer), in video, produced a number of art installations, site-specific works and several books. Since 2006, he has been a professor in expression studies at the College of Contemporary Psychology, Rikkyo University.

"I don't live to make dance," he once said. "When there is something I want to express, if I hold a pen it will be poetry, if I have a canvas in front of me it will be a painting, and if there is space around me it will become a dance."

Watching Saburo Teshigawara

Teshigawara turned away from established dance styles to find his own path. His meeting with Miyata – who had no dance training, but possessed an intense physicality – was a turning point. For The Point of the Wind (1986), their breakthrough at Bagnolet, they had explored ideas of the body being empty. "An empty body would crumble and fall," recounts Teshigawara. "Miyata immediately understood intuitively … she crumbled to the ground. And it wasn't a crumbling from the legs, but a crumbling from the head."

The idea of an "empty body" was Teshigawara's point of departure for developing his own style of movement, for which the idea of air – both as space and breath – became central. Indeed, there is something aerial and avian about Teshigawara's dancers: poised and alert, their bodies animated from within by gusting, eddying energies as if by invisible currents. A sense of "innerspace" interacting with exterior space also intrigued Teshigawara in his work with blind performers, Flower Eyes (STEP, 2000) and Luminous (Karas, 2002).

Though he's a choreographer, Teshigawara is also a writer, painter, lighting and set designer; dance isn't always to the fore. His sets are often very striking, mixing natural and man-made materials: a floor of broken glass (Glass Tooth, 2006), walls of books (Bones in Pages, 2003). In Green, 2003, he performed with animals (learning in the process, he says, that "a goose is pretty big" and "a chicken is stupid").

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2011/jun/15/dance-saburo-teshigawara-karas/print Page 2 sur 5 Step-by-step guide to dance: Saburo Teshigawara and Karas | Stage | theguardian.com 03/10/13 17:34

Think of Teshigawara's pieces not as theatrical events but as sensorial experiences, more poetic than dramatic, interested in symbol rather than story, with nebulous meanings but vivid sensory effects.

Who's who

Teshigawara's most longstanding collaborators are Kei Miyata, his co-director with whom he founded Karas in 1985, and Rihoko Sato, a performer who joined the company in 1996 and went on to become his choreographic assistant.

Fact

In 1985 Teshigawara buried himself up to his neck in earth by a river bank, for eight hours – an exploration, apparently, of the relation between air and the body.

In his own words

"My body is here, and my heart is on the moon." Interview with Michael Kurcfeld, LA Times, 1990

"Dance is not a form for the purpose of communicating information. What is important with dance is whether it is alive or not." Interview with Maimi Sato, Japan Foundation, 2008

In other words

"Japanese choreographer Saburo Teshigawara is a consummate artist of surfaces – brilliant, inventive, precise – but chillingly impenetrable." Judith Mackrell, Independent, 1993

"Dancer, choreographer and artist Saburo Teshigawara works in a time zone of his own." Natasha Brereton, Japan Times, 2005

"Teshigawara's choreographic interest often focuses on how the body changes in reaction to outer elements … and how our existence corresponds to our environment." Akiko Tachiki, Ballettanz, 2008

Do say

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2011/jun/15/dance-saburo-teshigawara-karas/print Page 3 sur 5 Step-by-step guide to dance: Saburo Teshigawara and Karas | Stage | theguardian.com 03/10/13 17:34

"The air outside the body is the same medium as the breath inside it. Wow."

Don't say

"I've lost the plot." (There never was one.)

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http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2011/jun/15/dance-saburo-teshigawara-karas/print Page 5 sur 5 Bachtrack

Teshigawara takes on Dostoevsky: The Idiot at the Print Room Review by Graham Watts, 31 March 2019

It is perhaps for the best not to wrestle with any narrative connections between this hour-long, pared-down dance theatre and the novel that it is supposed to represent. They are there, if often so subtle as to be only a thin veneer of relevance to the two central characters in Dostoevsky’s tome (for this viewer, at least), portraying just a fleeting flavour of Prince Myshkin (The Idiot) and Nastasya Filippovna, the main female character.

Much better instead to see this as a work of dance and gesture, even if with thin connotations to The Idiot, and, with this caveat, for the first 30 minutes I felt it to be an absorbing work performed by a movement genius with the most extraordinary quality of motion. I don’t usually reference a performer’s age but Saburo Teshigawara is now 65 and it is beyond my comprehension that a man can still move with such muscular control and feline fluidity well into his seventh decade. We first encounter Teshigawara in a faithful representation of Dostoevsky’s innocence and essential goodness before he launches into a dynamic solo, which has resonance with hip-hop qualities of body-popping and locking with Teshigawara moving like a marionette controlled by a manic puppeteer, his body distorted into unusual shapes and arms fluttering around his torso like a kaleidoscope of butterflies. The character of Myshkin first appears in the novel, having returned to Russia from a long period overseas, being treated for epilepsy and one supposes this solo to represent that condition; or, perhaps it is the unworldly-wise young man being subject to the disdain and vilification of those around him; or, maybe, both (and more). Several minutes into the work, the main protagonist is joined on stage by Rihoko Sato (who has worked closely with Teshigawara in his various creative guises under the KARAS umbrella, since 1995) who floats through the space in her evocation of the enigmatic Nastasya Filippovna. The empathetic Myshkin has compassion for this woman (who is emotionally broken and destructive, having been sexually abused by her guardian from a young age), and a sequence appears to describe their interaction at a ball with a Tchaikovsky waltz playing as he gently, and protectively, shepherds her into a formal dance. But Sato’s Filippovna is austere and unobtainable and as Teshigawara spins and turns with passion, Sato whirls contemptuously away from him in wider circles. Their relationship is evocatively described in dance through their frequent proximity but rarely touching (so far as I recall, they touch only once and briefly). Both performers are commanding presences. A third dancer (Emiko Murayama) appears briefly as a rat, scurrying quickly around the stage before absconding with Myshkin’s jacket, which he disrobes in slow motion.

The music is a tempting collage of uncredited melodies from Russian composers (as well as Tchaikovsky there is also Shostakovich) and the flickering lighting effects add atmosphere, which is also assured through the choice of venue (The Print Room at the Coronet is a one-of-a-kind theatrical venue, decked with candles and artefacts throughout the public areas to give a timeless, aged quality). Costume also plays a part in accentuating the contrasts between the two characters, with bald-headed Teshigawara wearing a buttoned-up white shirt and bell- bottomed white trousers with turn-ups (like something Gene Kelly might have worn in On The Town); Sato has blonde hair tightly woven into plaits and wears a long black dress.

Unfortunately, the arresting value of the opening did not sustain through to the end and with a grey rat scurrying around it all seemed to lose the clarity of shape that the beginning had promised. Nonetheless, the exceptional movement qualities of these veteran performers – and another chance to visit this unique and memorable venue – made for a very worthwhile evening.

***11 The Times

Review: The Idiot at the Print Room, W11 Famous for fashioning poetic, symbolic and often strikingly designed performances, Teshigawara here gives us masterfully detailed dancing ★★★★☆

Review by Donald Hutera, 25 March 2019

Saburo Teshigawara and Rihoko Sato in this oblique take on Dostoevsky’s The Idiot Photo Elliott Franks

The work of the sexagenarian Japanese dance artist Saburo Teshigawara has not been seen in London in eight years. This lends cachet to the UK premiere of his decidedly oblique yet uncommonly rewarding take on Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Published in 1869, the novel is centred on an open-hearted, guileless young man named Prince Myshkin. Its weighty themes, including atheism, Christianity, innocence, guilt, morality and mortality, arise from his innate goodness as well as the conflicts and desires of the various characters swirling round him. Not that any of this needs to unduly concern anyone unfamiliar with the literary source of this 2016 production. Trained in the visual arts and ballet, Teshigawara is famous for fashioning poetic, symbolic and often strikingly designed performances. He is not the sort to place a high value on conventional linear narrative or character exposition. But what an extraordinary performer he is. Slightly built, bony and bald, he has the wizened face of an ageless baby who looks as if he grew up sucking lemons. As the embodiment of Myshkin, Teshigawara’s simple costume is a dark suitcoat over white shirt and trousers. First seen greeting what we might imagine to be a roomful of people at a party, his manner is polite, a little awkward and innocent. A key point of his magnetic performance is that Myshkin has epileptic seizures (as did Dostoevsky). This medical condition underlies some of the movement: bandy-legged and jerking like a marionette, with twitching limbs and fibrillating fingers. It also influences the lighting (for which, as with all of the show’s design, Teshigawara is also responsible). Whether dim, bright or shifting between these states, the light is almost always flickering. That quivering quality infiltrates Teshigawara’s masterfully detailed dancing, which offers glimpses of a compellingly willowy beauty. This isn’t quite a one-man show. Teshigawara receives fine support from Rihoko Sato, glittering yet severe as the novel’s main female protagonist. There is also a mysterious cameo by a third dancer cast as a scurrying rodent. The Idiot is flawed, the action cued to a sometimes crude yet atmospheric mash-up of classical music (Shostakovich, Schubert), beats and sound effects. It could be considered obscure, but the net effect is nonetheless riveting.

The Idiot — Saburo Teshigawara & Rihoko Sato at the Print Room at the Coronet ★★★★★

Review by Marissa Khaos, 22 March 2019

Like many works of a literary canon, Dostoevsky’s great novel The Idiot, and his personal favourite, is punctured by ideas and narratives delivered in a lengthy and complicated format that can risk distancing the feeling from the reader. Saburo Teshigawara’s soporific sculpting of the story brings not a bulky book to the stage but, as in his own words, captures the “impossibilities” of the book and the novel-form in general to communicate feelings beyond the capacity of words. This dance performance of the The Idiot speaks from between the words, depicting the innocence of the “idiot” Prince Myshkin, whose self-aware and empathetic character finds himself a stranger in the midst of a society concerned with money and power through manipulation and deception. The schizoid choreography – through poignant yet subtle gestures of the face with its silent screams and its pained laughter alongside the frantic hand gestures – perfectly depicts the epileptic nature of goodness. Ostensibly, goodness is not arrived at through plot and planning but is inherent in the fragmentary character of the idiot. Teshigawara is joined on stage by his long-time partner Rihoko Sato, whose delicately nuanced gesture and shifting between the shadow and the light depicts the gloriously enticing madness of Nastasya Filippovna. The fierce beauty and intimidating personage of Nastasya’s innocence lost is captured in Sato’s fluid movement and the intricate dialogue with, against and isolated from Teshigawara’s love-struck hero. The “carnivalization” with which Mikhail Bakhtin read Dostoevsky’s novel is embodied in this celebration of Teshigawara’s choreography, direction, lighting, sound and costume design, which theatricalises the two central carnival figures of the idiot and the madwoman; though one could also read in this dance the presence of Rogozhin, whose torment by his love and obsession for Nastasya forms one of the love triangles in the book. A third character joins the narrative but merely to slither in the shadows reminiscing DH Lawrence’s observation of Dostoevsky who is “like a rat, slithering along in hate, in the shadows, and in order to belong to the light professing love, all love”. It seems, however, that even the author himself could not foresee the plot and character relations that develop throughout the novel. The performance of innocence and corruption in this entrancing dance that includes the Shostakovich waltz is a flawless reimagining of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Do not miss it.

Photo: Abe Akihito