"Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited; imagination embraces the world..."
Albert Einstein
Carlotta Ikeda returns to Oriente Occidente: she was a guest in 1987 with Chiisako (The Little Boy), and like that occasion, she presents a creation that draws from the mythical imagery of Japan and transforms it into a pretext to evoke the world of childhood and dreams. Ikeda writes in presenting the show for this edition: “In Japanese, Uchuu means space, cosmos, universe. For me, this word expresses what I do not know. Uchuu is the place where the imaginary floats. In writing this cabaret, I want to explore this imaginary and represent the vertigo of dreams, even if they are childish.” And it is precisely this that the cabaret signed by Carlotta Ikeda embodies. Of Butoh (the avant-garde dance that originated in Japan in the 1960s), she is among the most famous artists in the world, having founded, in 1974, the first all-female company, Ariadone, which is now based in Bordeaux, France. Her Uchuu-Cabaret races swiftly between the innocence of fairy-tale and surreal dreamlike atmospheres, the eroticism of burlesque-style scenes, the irreverent parody of the can-can at the Moulin Rouge, and the playful acrobatics of the circus arena. Carlotta Ikeda's dance undoubtedly represents one of the highest expressions of the interplay between East and West. Scene after scene, character after character, the show unfolds almost like a sequence of infinite metamorphoses, in a triumph of the baroque, the grotesque, and the provocative. Because there are no limits to imagination, and Carlotta Ikeda is a powerful explorer of its possibilities. Also because—in this, the choreographer translates the great lesson of Butoh—in the essence of dance, the body must move like a living, changing sculpture molded by life itself. A luminous and transparent substance, revealing all that has been sculpted by time: an uchuu, a cosmos without boundaries.
Carlotta Ikeda, of Samurai descent, began dancing in Tokyo in 1960; she deepened her study of contemporary dance through the German expressionism of Mary Wigman and the American modern dance of Martha Graham. After meeting Tatsumi Hijikata, in the early 1970s, she worked with the Dairakudakan group, and in 1974, she founded the Ariadone Company with Ko Murobushi: an all-female group to explore a different mode of the traditional Japanese Butoh dance. In 1978, she embarked on her first tour in Europe and presented performances in Paris and at numerous festivals, becoming a key figure in this discipline alongside the Sankai Juku group. Today, Carlotta Ikeda and the Ariadone Company reside in France, in Bordeaux. Among her most famous works are the solos Utt (1981) and Waiting (1996), as well as the group choreographies Last Eden (1978), Zarathustra (1980), and Haru no Saiten (1998).
www.ariadone.com
