The Ghost light

Kaori Ito

Steeped in Japanese culture and trained as a dancer in the West, Kaori Ito developed a hybrid and unique vocabulary that’s very much like her. At the junction of cultures and languages, she’s interested in the unsaid and the invisible. Close to Tanztheater, she grounds her work in her life story and that of the performers to prompt an intimate need to be on stage. Relying on the intelligence of the body, she seeks immediacy and instinct as the mainspring of action. From essential themes such as taboos, the end of the world, death, love, loneliness, she generates raw and spontaneous texts. These blunt, sharp words trigger the necessary, swift and wild movement she’s looking for. She shapes a body that gets empty to receive the emotions of the audience. This allows her to access a textual and choreographic vocabulary emerging from the inside and questioning us about our animality and our humanity.

“What I strive for in my work is to animate space. I try to give life to the empty space around me. It is somehow like the approach of a puppeteer. There is something interesting in the idea of manipulation. I try to discover who is pulling the strings, which element attracts the other… There is a sort of continuous spiral in which we don’t know who does what, and that’s what is interesting. I try to totally empty myself, so that people can project things. I’m not trying to guide them. I believe that it’s not my brain thinking when I dance, it’s my body expressing itself. So I’ll try not to convey a message that’s too intellectual.”

“Theatre is a confession, every night it is life that begins and ends.”

Creations

2020 Dears
with Marvin Clech, Jon Debande, Nicolas Garsault, Louis Gillard, Delphine Lanson, Leonore Zurfluh
Creation at KLAP Maison pour la danse in Marseille
in October 2020

2020 The Silk Drum
With Yoshi Oïda and Makoto Yabuki / Text by Jean-Claude Carrière
Executive production by the Maison de la Culture d’Amiens
Creation for the 2020 Avignon Festival

2019 Wachtraum (Daydream)
Commission from the Chemnitz Ballet as part of France Dance Germany

2018 Is it worth to save us?
Duet with Miraï Moriyama
Creation at KAAT in Kanagawa Japan as part of Japonismes 2018

2018 Robot, eternal love
Solo by Kaori Ito
Creation at KLAP Maison pour la danse in Marseille

2017 Fire me up
Spoken and danced confidences by Kaori Ito and Théo Touvet
Creation for the Antigel festival in Geneva

2016 ¿Puedo Flotar?
Commission from the BANCH Chilean National Ballet

2015 Je danse parce que je me méfie des mots
Duet with her father

2013 Asobi
Commission from the Ballets C de la B – Alain Platel

2010 Island of no memories
Creation for the (Re)connaissance contest, first place.
This show was chosen for the Modul-Dance program by the EDN (European Dance Network)

2009 Solos
Creation at the Théâtre Le Merlan – scène nationale de Marseille
Recreation at the Lyon 2012 biennial

2008 Noctiluque
Creation at the Théâtre de Vidy- Lausanne

COLLABORATIONS

2014 La religieuse à la fraise
with Olivier Martin-Salvan
as part of Sujets à vif of the Avignon Festival

2012 Plexus
by Aurélien Bory for Kaori Ito

FILM DIRECTION

2004 Carbon Monoxide
This film was screened at the Pompidou Centre in Paris and at several festivals in the US.

2006 Niccolini
With James Thiérée, Damien Jalet and Niklas Ek

2006 The sea is calm
with Zaratiana Randriananatenalina

The Ghost light

HOLOGRAPHIC CABARET

Magic, circus, dance, music
A show by Valentine Losseau & Raphaël Navarro
Cie 14:20

Each night, after the show, when artists have left the stage, when the spectators came back home, the theatre team sets a night-light on stage. A simple light bulb, set on its stand, the Servant, the Sentinel, keeps shining come what may and prepares itself to fight, in this empty theatre, the spirits that are sure to appear and bewitch the place. It is known as the Ghost Light. While waiting to go back on stage as usual, the artists from the Ghost Light gathered, under their phantomatic appearance, in an artistic cave. In a surrealistic suite, artists take advantage of their (provisional) immateriality : multiplied, Yaël Naïm a four-parts choir sings on her own, the dancer Kaori Ito traces the outline of her movements in the air, the enchanting singers from Birds on a wire go up in smoke…

A great performative celebration…
…a humoristic mockery of the recordings of shows that we watch from our living room, in order to invite the spectators in the cave, on the side of reality, and question together the conditions of our collective presence.

This show was created to support the artists, the technical teams and the cultural institutions suffering from the Covid-19 pandemic. It celebrates the spectators, the stage-room relationships that are built in all forms of complicity to better find each other, in the flesh and safely.

PROGRAM, CREDITS AND MENTIONS

A show by Valentine Losseau & Raphaël Navarro
Cie 14:20

La Disparition
with Clément Dazin
Music : Antoine Berland

L’art de détourner l’attention
with Yann Frisch

Traces
with Kaori Ito
Music : Madeleine Cazenave et Patrick Watson

She
with Yael Naim
Music : Yael Naim

The Silk Drum
with Kaori Ito et Yoshi Oida

To be or not to be a hologram
with Eric Antoine
Music : Madeleine Cazenave

Miss
with Lou Doillon
Music : Lou Doillon

L’air de Papageno et Papagena
with Laurence Equilbey, Anas Séguin, Chiara Skerath
Music : Mozart – direction Laurence Equilbey.

Le Chant des Oiseaux
with Dom la Nena et Rosemary Standley
Music : Birds on a wire

Epilogue : The Ghost light
with Kaori Ito
Music : Yael Naim

Writting, magic, stage direction : Valentine Losseau et Raphaël Navarro
Technical management : Eric Bouché-Pillon
Video : Frédéric Baudet, Natalianne Boucher, Charles Carcopino, Jérémy Collet, Clément Debailleul, Sylvain Decay, Simon Frézel, NikodiO, Gaston Marcotti, Mathieu Plantevin
Lights : Valentine Losseau et Mathieu Plantevin
Musics : Antoine Berland, Birds on a wire – Dom la Nena et Rosemary Standley, Madeleine Cazenave, Lou Doillon, Laurence Equilbey, Yael Naim, Patrick Watson.
Sound editing : Dominique Bataille
Special management : Marco Bataille-Testu
Administration : Céline Ferré assistée de Sabrina Chang Kuw
Lighting interns: Martín Barrientos, Georgia Tavares
Acknowledgments Corinne Licitra. Merci à la Chaufferie – Cie DCA. Merci à Véronique Soulier N’Guyen, Eva Cissé, Christine Lucazeau.

Coproduction : Théâtre de la Madeleine de Troyes, Maison de la Musique de Nanterres, Cie 14 :20.
Cie 14:20 is supported by the city of Rouen and the DRAC Normandie.
The Ghost Light was presented for the first time at Théâtre de l’Avant-Seine, Colombes.