Avignon (AFP)

Her latest creations are like "dances with the spirits": in a year marked by separations, the Japanese choreographer and dancer Kaori Ito invokes the ghosts of disappeared beings to better mourn them.

The artist, who has lived in France for 15 years, is multiplying this fall, chaining several shows from Avignon to Paris, after having fed on the "void" created by confinement but especially the rage to come back on stage.

Haunted by the representation of absence on stage, she believes more than ever in what she "does not see".

“Long before confinement, I wondered how to work on what is invisible around us,” the 40-year-old choreographer told AFP.

"In this collapsing world, we no longer feel the presence of the absent," says the artist who has danced for the big names in contemporary dance, from Philippe Decouflé to Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, passing by Angelin Preljocaj.

- "Like wifi waves" -

"Without touching each other, we can touch people," adds the dancer trained in classical ballet in Japan and modern dance in the United States.

In the City of the Popes, where the Festival d'Avignon, canceled this summer, is organizing an Art Week until October 31, she presents "Le Tambour de Soie", with a legendary actor from Peter Brook, Yoshi Oïda, 87 years.

The show, which will tour at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris and the Maison de la Culture in Amiens, among others, is inspired by a Noh classic - a form of traditional Japanese theater mixing poetic texts, songs, dance and music.

"If you manage to make my drum ring, I'll be yours," the dancer says to an old man who has fallen in love with her.

The instrument being of silk remains silent, leading the old man to suicide, before his ghost returns to haunt the dancer.

"In Japan, we live a lot with ghosts, they are ancestors who protect us. In the West, we associate them with horror films," said the artist from the city of Toyohashi.

"Spirits are like wifi waves, you can't see it, but they're there," she laughs.

Kaori Ito, who runs his own company Himé, this summer invoked spirits otherwise.

After confinement, during which burials were prohibited for relatives, she suggested to the director of the Hill Theater Wajdi Mouawad to install "a telephone booth where people can speak with their dead".

"It already exists in Japan; it was after the tsunami, people felt very guilty for not having saved their loved ones, for having let go of their baby's hand," says Kaori Ito, who is the mother of a little boy. .

At La Colline, nearly 200 people took part in the experience, giving rise to the project "La parole nochère" (which takes place every Saturday at the theater where Kaori guides the participants who testify anonymously).

"It's to heal the soul," she said.

With their agreement, she recovered a hundred recordings to use them in her other creation, "Chers", which will begin on November 4 at the Centquatre, in Paris, where she is an associate artist.

They are mingled with letters written by the five dancers of the play to their missing relatives, all read by an actress who acts as a "shaman, a ferryman of souls".

“On stage, the dancers are like souls that fly very quickly,” she says.

The show is also inspired by the dramaturgy of the Noh theater "where there is always a part written for ghosts" and of which "the aim is to appease the soul".

"There has been a lot of pain, a lot of suffering this year, the theater had to be there to fluidize negative energies", explains the choreographer.

Other shows by Kaori Ito appeal more to the flesh than to spirituality.

At La Scala Paris, she takes over "Embrase-moi" (2017), where she and her companion, the circus artist Théo Touvet, share their past sexual experiences before dancing naked and presenting an astonishing number of Cyr wheel.

"I often combine dialogue and dance. But the body expresses itself much more than the words", she says.

© 2020 AFP