The many faces of life and death
With Barbara Do
Izanami# is a butoh/noise performance about transformation. It’s a poetic sacrifice, from an agonizing body to a new flesh, beyond human. Expurgating the necessary Death of things for them to be renewed (objects, ideas, people, civilisations…), the unavoidable steps through struggle and abandonment to be liberated and rise again, empowered, forever changed.
We rely on Japanese myths and magic (a complex mesh of supernatural forces like deities, spirits, yokai, and karmic objects) to organize this mutation process.
The dance freely draws from butoh’s energy and imagination to embody a physical and symbolic ritual journey, with an organic and eerie presence. Body postures and movements pursue a progression in dynamics, building tension, creating hypnotic motives and expressive tableaux, inherent to the tale.
The performing space defines key elements, as its singular history and features will determine the end and the becoming.
A dark joke, a thumb in the nose of death, a poetic descent in the underworld, a sinuous and organic path through invisible forces that reshape us, to a final cathartic ascent.
Protocol
We conceive a trajectory, reflecting a 3-steps narrative:
- Agony & death
- Wandering spirit in the underworld,
- Transformation/rebirth as yōkai…
Site-specific
Each opus of Izanami# being autonomous, unique and site-specific, our artistic process is to think both intuitively and candidly when envisioning a performing space, while relating to the background and special aspects of the location (such as architecture, history, usage…) as an inspirational starting point. We are kin on using what the place has to offer in terms of settings and imagery, and get driven by it. Music/sound design and dance/body motion’s style and quality, in association, infer from these elements. The relative emergency of creation conditions the rawness of the act, imagined as a postmodernist ritual.
Jiko : Live @ L’Embobineuse
20th Anniversary opening night, Nov 1st 2024
Camera : Rachele Cerelli, Lights : Ifig, Recording : Flo Aulne / Steph Cottin, Mask : Rachele Cerelli
Process
We conceive a trajectory, reflecting a 3-steps narrative:
- Agony & death
- Wandering spirit in the underworld,
- Transformation/rebirth as yōkai…
This storyline shapes a flexible structure into which we improvise motion and sound, following preset baselines, for about 35 to 45 minutes.
The dance draws from Butoh to embody a physical and symbolic transformative journey, with an organic and eerie presence. Body postures and movements pursue a progression in dynamics, building tension, creating hypnotic motives and expressive tableaux. There is a focus on exhibiting breathing/drowning and flow, and playing with balance.