CARLOTTA IKEDA

And that is how the miracle can occur. When Carlotta Ikeda, dances, every instant dances, even in Zarathoustra, that she revived twenty-five years after its premiere : there she is, over sixty offering her hieratic presence in her two performances, enormous and tiny at the same time, silent watch of a world swarming with savagery, where the furies have unleashed chaos. One may think, then, that her art has always been defined as this form of intense meditation, where the unseen face of the world comes to the surface and thrives in the mystery of a body.

Paradox of the dance: what she shows then is but one aspect of her presence. Even in a solo performance, the stage is « full of invisible partners », according to Mary Wigman, the pioneer of modern dance in Europe. One night, looking at her tired face of insomniac in a mirror, she decided to create Hexentanz (The witch’s dance : she wanted to meet the witch who was in her and whom she did not know yet. In an interview in 1987, Carlotta Ikeda expressed a very similar feeling:

« When I dance, there are two persons in me, living together: one in transe, that does not control itself any longer, and the other observing the first one with lucidity. Sometimes, these two « I » coincide and give birth to a sort of white madness, close to ecstasy. That is how the But™ dancer must try to feel. It s for that privileged moment that I dance.

Ariadone, the company that Carlotta Ikeda founded in 1974, refers to that Ariane s thread, that follows Carlotta Ikeda from one show to the next. As one could expect, mirror games are very often used, not for reflecting images, but to transform appearances : what is to be found on the other side of the mirror? A paradise lost? That Last Eden which was, in 1978, the show that Carlotta Ikeda first toured in Europe, together with Ko Murobushi ?

I think that the flesh of the dance, that constant metamorphosis of changing moods, can neither be photographed, nor filmed. As strange as it may seem, But™ is indeed photogenic : zooming on grinning faces, grotesque postures, white-painted bodies, can well build a row of exotic and frightening deformities. Still they are, to a certain extent, reassuring images. Laurencine Lot s photographies draw quite a different scenery. They can be humble, stay at the right distance to the dancer, letting the dancing space untouched. Silently, she has been accompanying Carlotta Ikeda step by step on her Ariane s thread. Zarathoustra, Utt, Himè,Chii Saako, Blackgreywhite, Waiting, Haru no Saiten, are shown in these pages as phases of a journey of initiation. The journey of an exceptional artist, who considers dancing as a place to be, intimate and universal.

Jean-Marc Adolphe