Kaori Ito
Steeped in Japanese culture and trained in Western dance, Kaori Ito has developed a singular hybrid vocabulary that is very much her own. At the crossroads of cultures and languages, she is interested in the unspoken and the invisible. Close to dance theatre, she draws on her own experience and that of the performers to bring out an intimate need to be on stage. Relying on bodily intelligence, she seeks immediacy and instinct as the driving force behind the act. From essential themes such as taboos, the end of the world, death, love and solitude, she creates raw, spontaneous texts. From these raw, vivid words springs the necessary, dazzling, wild movement she is looking for. She works with a body that empties itself to welcome the spectator’s emotion. This gives her access to a textual and choreographic vocabulary that starts from the inside and asks us questions about our animality and our humanity.
‘What I’m looking for above all in my work is to make space move. I try to make the empty space around me exist. It’s a bit like being a puppeteer. There’s something interesting in this idea of manipulation. I’m trying to work out who’s pulling the strings, what element is attracting the other… There’s a kind of continuous spiral where you don’t know who’s doing what and that’s what’s interesting. I try to create a complete vacuum, so that people can project things. I’m not trying to guide them. I don’t think it’s my brain that’s thinking when I’m dancing, it’s my body that’s expressing itself. So I’m going to try not to get across a message that’s too cerebral.’
‘Theatre is a confession, every night it’s life beginning and ending.’
In 2023, eight years after bringing her projects to fruition within her own company, Kaori Ito is taking over as director of the TJP, Centre dramatique national de Strasbourg – Grand Est. Her aim is to make the TJP a transdisciplinary, intercultural and intergenerational theatre centre that promotes the cross-disciplinary nature of art, the importance of the questions that children ask and their involvement in the creative process.
Source: website of the artist
