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

Island of No Memories

Island of no memories takes up the choreography that earned Kaori Ito the first prize at the in the [Re]connaissance national contemporary dance competition in Novembre 2009 at the Hexagone in Meylan.

The challenge of this creation was to reinterpret with five performers a project that was initially created for a trio.

The starting point is Isidora : an island that looks just like our world. But the major difference is that in Isidora no one can remember anything. Nobody has a name, or a house, or a family. Or you could say that everyone has the same name and the same house and the same family, a single word and a single place and a single name called Isidora.

CAST AND CREATIVES

Choreographer Kaori Ito
Performers Kaori Ito, Thomas Bentin, Mirka Prokešová
Playwright Satoshi Kudo
Lights Thomas Veyssiere
Sound Louise Gibaud
Music selection and sound editiong Guillaume Perret
Distribution Sarah De Ganck – ArtHappens
Production, Administration Cécile Jeanson (Bureau FormART)

Production

Production Bureau FormART Coproduction Le Merlan Scène Nationale de Marseille, le Grand Théâtre de Luxembourg, Saitama Arts Theater (Japon), Le Pacifique CDC de Grenoble Avec le soutien de MODUL-DANCE : Tanzhaus NRW, Dusseldorf, HELLERAU, Dresden, et le Centre National de la Danse de Pantin. Avec l’aide de l’ADAMI et la SPEDIDAM