Creating The Idiot- An interview

The following is reprinted from PuShing it, the blog of the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival.

Monday, January 9, 2012

AN INTERVIEW WITH THE IDIOT CREATORS DIRECTOR JAMES FAGAN TAIT AND COMPOSER JOELYSA PANKANEA

Both “Crime and Punishment” and now “The Idiot” mark a certain production style in your body of work. How did it start?

JAMES FAGAN TAIT:
I had just finished working in the Downtown East Side with over 80 actors in a play, and I had done a few Ann Jellicoe-type community plays – one on Toronto Island, one in the Downtown East Side [In the Heart of a City] and six in Enderby with the Splatsin First Nations band and the City of Enderby – and I started believing in the power of large community and music and many people on stage of different variety. Read the rest

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Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot

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In a world obsessed with money, power, and sexual conquest, is a sanatorium the only place for a saint?

The award-winning team that brought you Crime and Punishment in 2005 returns with the world-premiere of a new adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s comic social critique, The Idiot.

The Idiot tells the story of the strange Prince Lyov Nikolayevich Myshkin – a person who is entirely and completely good. After four years convalescing in Switzerland, Myshkin returns almost cured of epilepsy and the “idiocy” it created in him. The moment his train crosses onto Russian soil, his adventure with love, truth and the whole rotten saga of human existence begins. He becomes enamored with Rogozhin, who himself is obsessed by Natasha Fillippovna, a beautiful woman with an unfortunate reputation. Read the rest

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