The Idiot

The Japanese artist Saburo Teshigawara, winner of the Golden Lion at the 2022 Dance Biennial, distinguished himself, as highlighted in the motivation of the Venetian award, for “his ability to build entire artistic ecosystems, together with his inexhaustible courage to unlearn”.

The performance aims to be a wordless transposition of Dostoevsky’s eponymous novel, as Teshigawara himself explains: “I was aware of the impossibility of creating a dance work starting from this literary masterpiece, yet this difficulty was the key to approaching and creating something entirely new. A dance that can only exist here. Without any use of the text, a piece of pure dance. Not only by impersonating the character linked to the original text, but also by embodying the movement that exists within words. Silent voices that can be heard amidst the words, screams, moans, murmurs and whispers, everything becomes movement and dance”.