Japanese choreographer Saburo Teshigawara has created a kind of homeopathic interpretation of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, distilled down until there’s almost nothing of the original left.
There are two people on stage: Teshigawara, as the “idiot” Prince Myshkin, and Rihoko Sato as the ultimate “it’s complicated” love interest, Nastasya Filippovna. Sixty-five-year-old Teshigawara (dressed in plain monochrome – nothing 19th-century here) captures facets of the Prince in enigmatic solos. There’s the wide-eyed innocent, walking stiltedly, arrested by the wonder around him; there’s the suffering epileptic, his body jiggering and shaking, feet frantic in a sort of soft shoe shuffle; and there’s the faithful Christian, face raised to God, framed in a single spotlight.
Sato’s Filippovna holds herself with pride and reserve. She’s unreadable, humourless, yet Myshkin is subtly bewitched. Sato moves quickly, criss-crossing, whirling and circling back on herself and he can’t grasp her, they’re running on different tracks, different rules.
There is one fleeting moment of connection, when hands meet, but from then on the couple revolve in separate orbits, even if still held by each other’s gravity. Is the point that these moments are anomalies and yet we can spend our lives chasing them, bound to them, thinking they hold the answers? Dostoevsky’s book intentionally drops the Prince’s character, representing pure goodness, into a society of conniving selfishness to watch how each responds to the other. But in Teshigawara’s version, what we see is mostly Myshkin in isolation, and it is mostly unrevealing.
Visually, Teshigawara creates very striking scenes with minimal means, with light used in dramatic contrast or in a quivering effect like an old cine film. And yet this serious-minded work remains ultimately unilluminating.
At Print Room at the Coronet, London, until 30 March.
