Saburo Teshigawara, Waltz, The Coronet

Saburo Teshigawara, Waltz, The Coronet Theatre, March 19, 2025

It is always going to be challenging to see a performance by an artist with the degree of mastery of Saburo Teshigawara and to find it doesn’t fit any easy classification. In the case of the UK première of Waltz, presented with impeccable programming at the Coronet, the music is familiar — with a strong romantic Russian flavour — but the choreographic use of gesture derives from the consciousness of an artist whole cultural and philosophical sensibility gives the waltz an unfamiliar context.
If you play the thirteen waltzes Teshigawara has chosen for Waltz one after the other there is, after the blustering opener of Johann Strauss’s Frühlingstimmen Walzer, a decidedly melancholic feeling. Teshigawara clearly feels drawn into this kind of brooding contemplation. The succession of waltz sequences gives the work the feel of frames in a choreographic film, from tightly wrought close-ups to expansive track shots. The music itself also suggests a cinematic treatment; alongside waltzes by Eugen Doga and Peter Gundry, even those of Chopin and Tchaikovsky sound as if they have been written for the cinema.
With two people on stage performing solos and duets, there are inevitably intimations of a narrative, snapshots of memory and experience. The waltz thus becomes a metaphor for life, one that has a regular rhythm and infinite melodies. In its social form the waltz is a partnership, and Teshigawara dances with his long-term partner, Rihoko Sato, but Waltz is an opportunity to use the familiar rhythm to channel more than the male-female relationship: through their contrasting but deeply complementary movement styles, what comes across is the relationship between melancholy and exuberance. Teshigawara, dressed in black, seems often introspective, a Hamlet figure afflicted with existentialist thoughts that take him ever closer to the edge of darkness. At one point he stamps his feet and bangs his fists against the wall like a petulant prince reacting to some nightmarish vision; it is as if he is trying to erase the rhythm of the waltz rather than reinforce it.

Following the music’s melodic line with his rapid changes of direction and his filigree arm and hand movements, Teshigawara is in contrast to Sato, dressed in white, who digs deep into the pulsing rhythms of the waltz for her whirlwind of life-giving affirmation. Despite the intimacy of their relationship, Teshigawara and Sato don’t ever touch; the significance of events portrayed exists within the beautifully calibrated space between them, with Teshigawara’s use of light suggesting physical and psychological boundaries. Musicologist Michel Schneider said of the voice that it is a gateway towards the unconscious (‘La voix est une porte vers l’inconscient’). With Teshigawara it could be said that the gateway towards the unconscious lies in his use of gesture. His limbs, precisely articulated around a dynamic core, carry the emotion of his dance far more than his face, which he wears like a mask, giving him the uncanny quality of a puppet with an extraordinarily expressive body. This in turn heightens the inexorable sense of fate hanging over Waltz. It is Sato’s autonomous, fluid presence, a headstrong muse swirling around Teshigawara with her long, thick white hair that completes but never finishes her movements, that seems to will him to life and, when she collapses, to nearly lose hers in the process. She elicits the ecstasy of the waltz to Teshigawara’s often tortuous indecision. It is significant that while Teshigawara opens Waltz, it is Sato who finishes it alone on stage in the dying of the light.

It is the kind of performance, like The Idiot from 2019, that keeps a tenacious grip of the imagination and won’t let go.
While the program does not specify who choreographed Waltz (I wasn’t able to attend the post-show talk to find out), it seems likely, given their unique styles of movement, that both Teshigawara and Sato had a hand in its creation and are jointly responsible for the remarkable synergy between them on stage. Sato is named ‘Artistic Collaborator’ but Teshigawara is listed as responsible for ‘direction, lighting design and costume’. It is perhaps his way of concentrating the creative vision as sharply as possible, but when the director is also performer he cannot see what the audience sees. There were two moments in the production that may have suffered because of this: an indeterminate hiatus towards the end of the performance — do we applaud or don’t we? — and the ending itself, which detracted from Sato’s richly deserved place alone on stage.

Saburo Teshigawara + Rihoko Sato in The Idiot at Print Room at The Coronet

Saburo Teshigawara + Rihoko Sato, The Idiot, Print Room at the Coronet, March 27, 2019

The filigree hands, the clarity of imagery, and the silence of the movement; the light flickering like an old film, the layers of Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Chopin and Schubert, the delirious dance and gesture: all these impressions remain vivid after seeing Saburo Teshigawara and Rihoko Sato in their adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. In many ways it is a perfect match for the intimate auditorium of Print Room at the Coronet, an eerie evocation of the past carefully reconstructed, superimposed and reduced to its essentials. 

In distilling Dostoevsky’s complex novel to its emotional essence, Teshigawara has articulated the elements of his choreography — the body, the lighting, the musical collage and the costumes — as a poet articulates language or a painter colour to form a complex unity of expression. In using his body Teshigawara seems to bypass it, concentrating on the breath inside him and the air around him to sculpt his images. His body seems to perform with its own gravitational field suspended slightly above the dark floor which is what creates the impression of silence while the thrust of his gestures — or their retraction — creates the sound. Sato is deeply attached to the earth — the waltz is her domain — creating a contrasting dynamic in the performance that is elusive and yet sharply focused. Perhaps this is what Teshigawara meant when he said, ‘I knew it would be impossible to create a choreography taken from such a novel, but this impossibility has been key to our approach in creating something completely new.’

The central character in the novel, Prince Myshkin, is, according to Dostoevsky’s biographer Avrahm Yarmolinsky, ‘a man caught in a tangle of mad passions, yet preserving a childlike purity and sweetness…’ and as the novelist himself wrote, his aim was to ‘to depict a completely beautiful human being’. It is evident when we see him that Teshigawara has taken on the humble radiance of the prince’s qualities as well as the darkness of his epilepsy and has made them manifest without the literary preoccupation with plot; they have become a dance. We see him at first alone, fashionably dressed, making polite introductions to a room full of people we cannot see; we know they are all there but Teshigawara’s focus is solely on the meekness and innocent purity of Myshkin’s gestures. When he comes into contact with the dark, willful passion of Sato’s Natasya Filippovna — a woman who has known degradation and carries those wounds within her — we see a flickering narrative in which it is clear he falls in love with her but the meeting sets off an emotional maelstrom within them both that becomes the choreographic material for its tragic resolution. 

Teshigawara’s choreography embraces Dostoevsky’s dilemma of placing a hero who is saintly to the point of being simple within a society that is awash in the corruption of values. Yarmolinsky suggests the novel is autobiographical, that the image of Myshkin is ‘a light in the darkness to Dostoevsky, a shield against the powers of evil in his own soul’. In Teshigawara’s hands, light and darkness become a powerful theatrical metaphor that unite the lighting, the musical score and the costumes — Sato is in a long black period dress while Teshigawara wears a dapper white summer outfit — to portray Dostoevsky’s existential struggle with Imperial Russian society. At the beginning we hear a tremulous violin concerto over a murky stage where shadows scurry ominously like rats until the darkness suddenly recedes to reveal the childlike figure of Myshkin in a bright downlight bowing gracefully and offering greetings to the invisible guests; the entire background of the novel has been painted in these two brief but consummately crafted scenes. The subsequent tale of compulsive infatuation pits Myshkin’s serenity against Filippovna’s stubborn inability to accept it and ends with Myshkin sitting on the floor, as in the novel, with the body of Filippovna in an adjoining room. The performances of Teshigawara and Sato are, like everything else in this production, meticulously conceived and delivered with a passion that hides their construction under a rich, seamless canvas of emotions. 

While scholars may disagree on the literary value of Dostoevsky’s novel, Teshigawara’s choreographic rendering is an utterly compelling poetic vision that is nothing short of a masterpiece in its own right.