Plexus

Aurélien Bory has produced a customised piece for the Japanese performer Kaori Ito. We trace the long journey of a woman who fights against the elements, ultimately in order to best dissolve into them. – Rosita Boisseau

Plexus comes from Late Latin and means ‘interlacing’. In its later anatomical meaning, it refers to a ‘network of nerves or vessels’. This word therefore indicates both the internal mechanism of muscular movement, nerve impulses and oxygenated blood, and the external mechanics of dance, interwoven gestures, movements, bodies or body parts. For the second time, I wanted to create the portrait of a woman, not as in a painting, a photograph or in literature – which are largely superior arts in this exercise – but by using the body and space as unique prisms, and dance as the initial view. 

Making a portrait of Kaori Ito based on stage methods was, for me, a process first and foremost. The set was not the initial idea. I decided on it after several weeks of rehearsals. For the early days, among other materials, I had a string puppet made in the image of Kaori Ito, a life-size and very realistic double. “Here is your dance teacher”, I told her. Kaori spent several hours observing it and following its movements to the letter. From this work I kept only the strings, using them throughout the entire space. The puppet remained in Kaori’s body. 

From the strings I composed a tangible, living space, from which a metaphysical drama emerged, with strong links to Japan. I obviously did not want to create something ‘Japanese’, but Kaori comes with her own story and measures her distance from the country today. I didn’t want to become distracted from this. Certain myths and recurrent motifs from Japan reappeared. On one hand was the idea of a link with ancestors and the dead. On another was the relationship with beauty that is connected to the shadows, elimination, disappearance. ‘Plexus’ starts from inside, from the body – this precise anatomical place, this network of nerves that is a vulnerable point – moving outside into space, a network of strings that echoes the etymology of the word plexus. 

Theatre therefore extends from the very interior, before life, to the very exterior after death, when the body disappears and becomes indistinct – where being and myth are reunited. I hoped that Kaori Ito’s dance – which occasionally was so hampered by impossibility of dancing in that space that it became immobile – could give us access to this dialogue between the inner and outer world. 

After the premiere at the Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne, a journalist reminded me that Isadora Duncan had said that after the long periods of immobility she imposed upon herself, she would find that the central source of all movement was the plexus. “The solar plexus lifted the body up, towards the au-delà.” 

Source : Aurélien Bory, November 2013