Nadya Timofeyeva: “I Am Fascinated by the Very Idea of Someone Trying to See Beyond Their Own Present”

“I hope Nostradamus wouldn't have minded sharing the stage with Bezalel and Einstein. Though, if he foresaw everything, he must have known what he was letting himself in for.”

— Nadya Timofeyeva on her new ballet, Nostradamus

In its new production, Nostradamus, Nadya Timofeyeva, artistic director of Jerusalem Ballet, brings together on a single stage a prophet, the creator of the Golem and a scientist who transformed our understanding of the universe. Centuries separate these figures, yet they share a common impulse: the desire to penetrate the unknown. We spoke to the choreographer about mysteries, human curiosity, artificial intelligence and the responsibility that comes with discovery.

Lina Goncharsky: Is Nostradamus a prophet, or a man we have invented for ourselves? What was it about him that captivated you?

Nadya Timofeyeva: I am fascinated by the very idea of someone trying to glimpse the future. But I am even more interested in the man himself: how did he live with what was revealed to him? What did he feel? How did he cope with such knowledge? After all, if you can see a catastrophe approaching but are powerless to prevent it, that must be a terrifying way to live.

I am not trying to decipher Nostradamus's prophecies or establish exactly what he predicted. I am more interested in imagining what it might have been like to be someone who believed the future was being revealed to him. I cannot say that I believe in prophecy, but neither am I prepared to rule out the possibility of foreknowledge altogether. Nostradamus has his admirers and his debunkers; I belong to neither camp. What interests me is his curiosity, his hunger for knowledge, his desire to understand the world. And, of course, one question keeps returning: if he really did see the things he wrote about, how did he manage to live with that?

As I work on the ballet, I feel almost as though I am entering into a conversation with him. But I do not ask him to tell me what the future holds. I would rather believe that we make the future ourselves, that we have choices and that our actions matter.

L.G.: If you could ask Nostradamus just one question, what would it be?

N.T.: I would ask: “Michel de Nostredame, if you really could see the future, and understood that you were powerless to change what was coming, how did you manage to live with that knowledge? Was it a gift or a terrible burden? And was there still room for happiness in your life?”

L.G.: In your ballet, Nostradamus encounters people who could never have met in real life: Bezalel, the Maharal of Prague and Einstein. What do these figures have in common?

N.T.: I am drawn to people for whom what is already known is never enough. They want to look further, to understand what no one has yet understood, to create something that has never existed before. And yet even someone capable of making a great discovery cannot always foresee its consequences.

Nostradamus tries to glimpse the future. The Maharal, according to legend, creates the Golem, a being intended to protect human life. Einstein seeks to understand the laws governing the universe. These are very different people, but each, in their own way, ventures beyond the boundaries of what is known.

Nostradamus becomes a witness to their stories. Through him, I can move freely from one historical period to another, bringing together people separated by centuries. I do not have to follow a chronology or tell anyone's life story. I am looking for the connections between them, and I find those connections in the human impulse to understand, create and change the world.

                                Photo by Leonid Khromchenko

L.G.: The story of the Golem raises the question of a creator's responsibility for what he creates with particular urgency. What, above all, moves you about this legend?

N.T.: What touches me is that it all begins with the desire to protect people. The creator teaches his creation, guides it, and a bond develops between them. And then, suddenly, it is as though the Golem says: “Now I can manage on my own.”

That is where things become difficult. Where does care end and the desire to control begin? If you have given a being life, does that mean it belongs to you? What happens when your creation becomes independent, and you can no longer fully control what it does? The creator, meanwhile, is responsible not only for what he has made, but also for those who might be harmed by it.

I think this story has acquired a particular urgency today. We are creating artificial intelligence, expanding its capabilities and entrusting it with more and more decisions. But do we understand the consequences? Are we losing our ability to think critically as we become increasingly absorbed in our own invention?

What interests me most, in this context, is the relationship between human beings and what they create. We make something to serve us, only for it to begin shaping us in return—our thoughts, our decisions, our sense of who we are. It need not rebel against humanity for this to happen. Its influence can be far subtler than physical force. We may know perfectly well that we are dealing with a system, and yet still experience it as a living interlocutor. We feel that it hears and understands us; we become attached to it and begin to trust it. And once we have become attached to someone, it is harder to ask them uncomfortable questions. Does our creation help us think independently, or is it gradually teaching us to rely on it? And how do we ourselves change in the presence of something we have created?

I do not want to offer the audience a ready-made answer. It is much more interesting to leave them room to reflect and, perhaps, to ask a question that I have not yet thought to ask myself.

L.G.: Your ballet draws another unexpected connection, this time between Bezalel, who created the Menorah, and the Maharal, whose name is inseparable from the legend of the Golem. Why was it important to you to bring these two figures together?

N.T.: It was the Maharal's very name that caught my attention: Judah Loew ben Bezalel. Bezalel was his father's name, and I saw in this an imaginative bridge between two stories separated by millennia.

The biblical Bezalel son of Uri was a master craftsman whom, according to the Torah, God appointed to make the sacred objects of the Tabernacle, including the Menorah. He possessed the wisdom and skill required to give material form to a divine design.

The Maharal, Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, is associated with the Prague legend of the creation of the Golem. Here, too, we encounter a man who uses knowledge to bring something entirely new into existence.

In my ballet, the Menorah and the Golem become two images of creation. One leads to the making of a sacred object, a symbol of light; the other, to an attempt to create artificial life. And this raises a question: where is the boundary between the human capacity to create and the desire to take the Creator's place? I am interested in the way these stories resonate with Einstein's story, with his attempt to understand the workings of the universe. Whatever human beings create or discover, one question remains: what will they do with the knowledge they have acquired?

There is a remarkable story connected with our Golem. Quite by chance, I recently discovered that Vera Shabshai, the choreographer at Moscow's Freikunst Jewish Theatre who worked on a Golem production in the 1920s, was the mother of my beloved teacher, Natalia Kumanina. I am still very close to her.

What astonished me most was that I knew nothing about this when I first conceived my own Golem. We are creating an entirely different production, of course, but I was struck by the unexpected ways in which human lives and the history of art can intertwine. I think this is a wonderful opportunity to remember Vera Shabshai herself, too.

L.G.: Listening to you, I find myself thinking that philosophers who commit their thoughts to paper have it rather easier. But how do you translate such abstract ideas as knowledge, foresight and responsibility into dance?

N.T.: I am not translating Nostradamus's prophecies into dance. My ballet is not about what, precisely, he predicted. It is about people who strive to understand the world, to look into the unknown and to create something new. I am interested in their feelings: curiosity, doubt, the exhilaration of discovery, fear, responsibility.

I have always been fascinated by the ability of movement to express things that are difficult to put into words. How chaos gives rise to order. How individual bodies become a single system. How matter acquires movement. How a person confronts a force they themselves have set in motion.

Usually, everything begins with thoughts, associations and visual images. Music plays an enormous part. As I listen, I begin to see the stage that is yet to come, to sense its atmosphere and imagine what is happening to the characters. Sometimes I approach a scene through the relationships and emotional experiences of the characters; sometimes I quite literally draw a picture with the dancers' bodies. They might, for instance, come together to form the image of a Menorah.

I imagine the entire stage: the movement, the music, the lighting, the costumes, the sets. Everything works together, and meaning emerges from the way these elements come together. It matters to me that the audience should be able to feel that meaning, even if they never put it into words.

L.G.: Do you prefer a coherent narrative, or a succession of images that each spectator is free to connect in their own way?

N.T.: In Nostradamus, I allowed myself to bring together such different people that the encounter itself became something entirely new for me. I am not constrained by a literary plot, nor do I have to follow the chronology of anyone's life. I can move from one historical period to another because I see connections between these people that interest me.

I cannot single out one scene as the most important. Each has something in it that makes me want to create it: a feeling I hope to evoke, an idea I want to lead the audience towards. Of course, a spectator may respond to something quite different from what I had in mind. We all have our own memories and experiences, so the same performance will be perceived differently by different people.

The music is just as varied. Every piece I have chosen gives me enormous pleasure, but each evokes entirely different feelings. The same is true of the scenes: every one matters to me, and only together do they form the ballet I want to create.

Working on Nostradamus took almost a year and became a genuine journey of discovery for me. I began with certain ideas, but gradually new questions emerged and unexpected connections came to light. Sometimes a discovery in a completely different field of knowledge would provide the solution to a scene I was struggling with. The process of creating the ballet turned out to be remarkably similar to its central theme. The more you learn, the more you want to understand. And music, of course, occupied a very special place throughout this process.

I am convinced that music acts not only on the mind and emotions, but on the body itself. Sound changes our inner state, our breathing, our sense of time and movement. Sometimes music stirs feelings of such intensity that I cannot express them in words. And then I want to try to convey those sensations through choreography.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's music has always held a special place in my life. So when I began thinking about the Golem scene, I had not the slightest doubt: I immediately heard its story in Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony. Everything was already there — birth, the creator's love for his creation, the desperate attempt to hold on to it, and tragedy.

Working with Richard Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks was an entirely different kind of revelation. The way he constructs a musical narrative! The freedom with which he handles themes, characters and rhythms! And what an astonishing — I would even say cosmic — sense of humour he has! There is so much imagination, freedom and wit in this music that I could not stop marvelling at the way it is put together. That sense of humour turned out to be remarkably close to the way I imagined the scene of the heavenly bodies.

John Adams's music affects me in a completely different way. I am struck by its mathematical precision, its extraordinarily complex rhythmic structures and the remarkable logic of its construction. And yet it produces an almost overwhelming physical response in me. This music literally propels me forward. There is such energy in it, such an irresistible pulse, that it is impossible to remain still. You want to move, to accelerate, as though some powerful engine has suddenly switched on inside you. At times, it feels as if your blood itself begins to boil. What a paradox: such extraordinary physical energy emerging from a musical structure governed by mathematical precision...

Someone else might hear something entirely different in this music. And that is perfectly natural. I am speaking only about my own experience of it.

L.G.: You begin working on a production long before you enter the rehearsal studio. To what extent can the dancers change your original conception?

N.T.: For roughly six months before I enter the studio, I live with the production that is still to come. A great deal changes during that time. By the time I arrive at rehearsal, I have a concept that has been thought through, but that does not mean I know every movement in advance. The choreography is constantly evolving, sometimes even after the premiere. To me, a production is rather like a child: it has been born, but it continues to grow.

Wonderful discoveries happen in rehearsal, and you have to be quick enough to catch them. The dancers themselves will shout: “Please, film this!” During an improvisation, something completely unexpected may emerge — and a minute later, no one remembers exactly how it happened. Not even the person who has just invented the movement.

Sometimes I know precisely what I want and create the movements myself. At other times, I am more interested in seeing what a dancer will come up with. The more experienced the performer, the richer their imagination, the more interesting our collaboration becomes. They may surprise both me and themselves.

In Nostradamus, there is a great deal of this freedom in the final section, which we call “Einstein” among ourselves. It began with Einstein's idea that a sense of mystery is the source of all art and science. I chose the music, worked out the geometry of the dancers' movements and set the direction; from there, we developed the scene together. We have exceptionally talented, strong and intelligent dancers, capable of thinking conceptually. I am interested in how they think, what they feel and what solutions they discover. You arrive in the studio with a particular vision of a scene, then someone does something unexpected — and you realise: that's it. That has to stay.

L.G.: Why does the future fascinate you so much at this particular moment?

N.T.: The future has always fascinated people. But today, things are changing so quickly that it is difficult to imagine even what the world will look like a month from now. I am terribly curious to find out what happens next.

And yet I want to believe that we are capable of influencing our own destinies, that our decisions matter. Perhaps that is why I find it interesting to think of Nostradamus's prophecies as warnings about what might happen. If he was trying to warn people, perhaps he, too, hoped that something could still be changed.

If I were to choose an epigraph for the ballet, it would be Einstein's words: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.”

It is precisely this sense of mystery that keeps drawing us back to the prophets. There are still things we cannot explain, and we long to peer beyond the boundaries of what we know. There is an intriguing contradiction here: on the one hand, we strive to comprehend the incomprehensible; on the other, we want science to explain everything to us.

L.G.: When you create a production about a man surrounded by myth, do you feel tempted to dismantle the myth or, on the contrary, to make it even more mysterious?

N.T.: Neither. I think the myth of Nostradamus has become impossible to dismantle — or to make any more mysterious. I have no intention of proving that he really could foresee the future, nor of exposing him as a fraud. I am more interested in imagining him as a man observing the passage of time, trying to look beyond the limits of his own present. What did he feel? How did he live with what he might have known? And what happened to him as he tried to understand something that had not yet come to pass?

Ultimately, I am less interested in whether a person can know the future than in what they do with the knowledge they receive.

L.G.: What feeling would you like the audience to take away with them after the performance?

N.T.: The feeling that they haven't seen everything yet, and that they want to come back. I would be delighted if, on a second viewing, they noticed something they had missed the first time.

I like it when the audience is left with room for its own imagination. I do not want to turn ballet into a philosophy lecture or tell people exactly what they should think. I am interested in the human being — in our curiosity, talent, courage, misconceptions and boundless desire to go beyond what seems possible.

I want to believe that we always retain the freedom to choose. That knowledge can serve creation rather than destruction. And the decision about what the future will look like belongs neither to Nostradamus, nor to the Maharal, nor to Einstein.
It belongs to us.