In 2021, the director of Venice's Biennale Danza, Wayne McGregor, stated the vision of his artistic project in his first edition: a wide-open view of dance as an art able to connect – both people and arts – and to face the challenges that technological and scientific discoveries increasingly offer, but always putting in first place choreographic skills and a sense of humanity, easily recognisable in those artists whose native culture is deeply identifiable but whose voice is universal. After paying tribute to the African choreographer Germaine Acogny with a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in 2021, McGregor designated this year's award to Saburo Teshigawara.
More than ever, Teshigawara can be defined as one of a kind: his peculiar dance idiom and theatrical inspiration are so clearly imbued by the Japanese aesthetic, above all in his research of the austere beauty of never-ending transformative movement. But his creativity is mostly nurtured by universal themes (often his works are based upon literary myths of western culture, as in the case of The Idiot or Tristan and Isolde) and is refined by the accurate balance between his own peculiar movements and an amazing lighting design, that not only gives to his dance sculptural nuance, but also dramatic expressiveness. Generally, Teshigawara leads spectators on voyages into intimate turmoils through danced soliloquies, or via intimate dialogues with his artistic partner and soul mate, the amazing Rihoko Sato, who is able to respond to Teshigawara's disarticulated smooth dynamics with the same ethereal quality of movement and inner resonance.
Following his personal research into the human essence, Teshigawara met on his way the sorrowful Petrushka, the popular puppet of Russian folklore to which Alexandre Benois and Igor Stravinsky gave a soul and the genial Mikhail Fokine a touching choreography to express it. In Teshigawara’s vision (premiered in Venice's Teatro Malibran on the eve of the Golden Lion Ceremony) the explosions of colours of the St Petersburg Shrovetide fair and the puppets’ costumes designed by Benois in 1911 disappear into the blackest darkness that immediately recalls an inner vision. To define Petrushka here, there is only a large white collar on a black dress, and a silicon mask in place of the celebrated Vaslav Nijinsky’s make-up for its original creation. Only when, as in the original ballet, Petrushka encounters the Ballerina, the creature of his dreams and desires, does colour appear in the ballerina’s dresses and in some other parts of the stage. But here again, colours are clearly symbols of something else: yellow jealousy, red passion, blue sadness and anguish.
Teshigawara’s choreographic concept is exquisitely refined. In the dry, quick gestures of his arms you can discover memories of Fokine’s iconic port de bras for the puppet. His description of the claustrophobic anguish for being imprisoned in his own loneliness is a clear quotation of the original choreography; as Nijinsky did, Teshigawara also bangs himself against the wall. It is really interesting that Teshigawara concentrates his analysis and quotation of the original archetype mostly in the second scene of the ballet, in which Fokine boldly changed the perspective from the objectivity of reality in the first scene to the subjective of the inner sufferance in the second. And surely the respectful, suggestive assonances with the 1911 creation are a plus value for this new Petrushka, which almost totally rests on the tiny, flattened shoulders of the charismatic Japanese Teshigawara, running for almost double the original ballet's length.
Of course, Teshigawara uses Stravinsky’s music, but he has elaborated a new score where the tune of Petrushka’s shouts come and go, interpolated in very intense frames of a musical texture in which ambient sounds flow into the piano variations from the ballet and the symphonic score. It is a functional and really coherent remake that helps to maintain the tension of the performance, which fades only in the latter stages of its 55 minutes when it tends to become a little repetitive and dramaturgically pleonastic.
