Fumiyo Ikeda spent nearly twenty years with the Rosas Company where she danced in nearly all the productions of choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Her remarkable experience of movement is enhanced by her marvellous stage presence. She began this project which takes her into another world, with two personalities whose artistic paths have been quite different from her own and with whom she had never worked before.
Their work process included discussions on current affairs and improvisations through which they developed a common language between theatre and dance.
At the end, the youngest of the three, Benjamin Verdonck, finally suggested they base their production on a book by Uzodinma Iweala. Usually, this actor and performer creates his own pieces and theatre installations in public places such as Hirondelle/Dooi Vogeltje/The Great Swallow where for seven days he was perched in a nest 32 metres up, on the facade of the Administrative Centre of the City of Brussels. Then in I Like America and America Likes me, he conversed with a pig for three days to express bewilderment over tensions between Iraq and the United States. Benjamin Verdonck is currently Artist-in-Residence at Nieuwpoorttheater in Ghent, at the Toneelhuis in Antwerp and at the KVS in Bruxelles, and he has worked with, among others, the playwright Arne Sierens as well as the Het Muziek Lod ensemble.
Alain Platel is the third accomplice in this unusual artistic adventure, Nine Finger. The choreographer and stage director from Ghent, artistic director of the Ballets C de la B, becomes, in this production, a link between theatre and dance through his particular way of being attentive and of showing artists in their best light in productions for all types of audience which reflect on the humanness of society as seen in Iets op Bach or more recently in vsprs.
At the Avignon Festival, Fumiyo Ikeda has danced in Rosas danst Rosas by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker in 1983. Alain Platel presented Bonjour madame… (Good Day Madam…) in 1996, Bernadetje in 1997, Tous des Indiens (All are Indians) in 2000 and was to have presented Wolf in 2003. He was invited to the Festival with vsprs in 2006.
To express need while skimming over a wound, through bodies and movement with extreme physicality, is the goal of the project called Nine Finger created by three Belgian stage figures with different backgrounds. Fumiyo Ikeda, the principal dancer in this production, initiated the idea. She has performed in nearly all the dance pieces by choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, but this one was created with performer Benjamin Verdonck and choreographer Alain Platel.
The artists' work is inspired from a novel written by Uzodinma Iweala, born in Washington DC in the United States of Nigerian parents, and who looks at war through the eyes and words of a child-soldier, Agu, enrolled somewhere in a nameless country in Africa. Beasts of no Nation deconstructs language to evoke this unspeakable horror from within. She portrays a crude, candid and wild image via two characters who are either alone or reflecting each other. Benjamin Verdonck plays out “all those voices in his head which tell him over and over that he is a bad boy.” Like a shadow of himself, alternating between dance movements and a simple presence which is strong and gentle Fumiyo Ikeda modulates or relays her voice and her acts. She is the other. She is daily life, his own absence, his mother, his friend.
A few basic objects, a big cardboard box, a plastic bag, a microphone, a mattress, a few bird songs, are all they need to conjure up a world, reinvent a house, a boat or a devastated landscape.
Nine Finger, part theatre, part dance, plays out this terrible, relentless story with poetry, with a touch of humour and with a lot of humanity.
Distribution
un spectacle créé par :Fumiyo Ikeda, Benjamin Verdonck, Alain Platel, Anne-Catherine Kunz, Herman Sorgeloos
joué par :Fumiyo Ikeda, Benjamin Verdonck
administration :Hanne Van Waeyenberge, Johan Penson
Production
production :Rosas (Bruxelles), KVS (Bruxelles)
en coproduction avec :De Munt / La Monnaie (Bruxelles) et le Théâtre de la Ville-Paris
avec le soutien des: autorités flamandes