Choreography and performance : Carlotta Ikeda Text : Pascal ...

Carlotta Ikeda
Although butô is the foundation of her choreography
work, Carlotta Ikeda, born Sanaé Ikeda, chose the Italian
forename of dancer Carlotta Grisi back at the start
of her career to express the opposition between butô
and Japan as it was at the time, and kept her surname
to express the relationship between traditional butô
art and contemporary western dance. Dancer and
choreographer Carlotta Ikeda is the female reference
in butô. It was after studying contemporary dance with
teachers close to Mary Wigman and Martha Graham
in Tokyo that she discovered the work of Tatsumi Hijikata,
the inventor of butô. This new choreographic
tradition, also called the ‘’shadow dance’’, brings
together life and death, presence and absence. The
dancer chose to put all her soul into this ghost dance.
In 1974, she founded her own company, Ariadone.
Like Ariadne’s thread being rolled out, the choreographer
has put on her shows like sequences in a
voyage of initiation: Zarathustra, Utt, Himé, Chisako,
Waiting, Haru no Saïten and Uchuu-Cabaret.
“Life exists for us to achieve a state of purity and truth,
which we find in nothingness. To represent nothing, to
become nothingness is the possibility to be all things.
Life is training for death, seeking to be no more, to
learn how to fade into nothing, to move towards that
faded beauty that precedes oblivion. This is one of
the essential foundations of my dance which is neither
form nor particular technique, but a fading of the self.
In front of the body, the spirit fades out, too. Being
surpasses self.” - Carlotta Ikeda