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I'm looking for a vital and necessary energy of movement, a dazzling gesture, like the act of a newborn baby. I always tell myself that the creation of'a show is both a painful and intensely joyful birth. When I'm on stage, I feel a power that goes beyond us and that's magical. But to get there, you have to work like an archaeologist, digging deep into the earth and your intestines to find what's hidden inside you.

With Moé Moé Boum Boum the TJP launches one production per season of creations for babies. This season, I'll be co-directing with the director, Juliette Steiner, and two performers, one a dancer, the other a singer, both of them a bit of clowns. Between them, we're looking for a way to accept the other and transform together, questioning the survival instinct for each and every one of them. 


With Battle mon cœurI'm launching a new series of duets based on an encounter through their flaws and animality.

Waré Mono continues to tour this season in dialogue with children about repairing our wounds and the world. Robot, eternal love is about the weakness of a human android and the weakness of humans. 

I'm also embarking on an ambitious Franco-Japanese creation on onomatopoeia in Japan. We're working with Japanese and French performers on the question of rituals of exclusion and sacrifice linked to poverty in the mountain regions of Japan. This cultural landscape of poverty is little-known. In the film "The Ballad of Narayama", the son has to abandon his mother in the mountains when she reaches a certain age, because weak people have to be sacrificed in order to support others. I'm going to work from a text in which a little brother has to sacrifice himself because his mother is dead and he's no longer useful to his family. It raises questions for me about today's world, where we lock ourselves into boxes and exclude others. 

For me, dance is between the person dancing and the person watching. Dance, or theater, is a dialogue that can remind us that we are connected, that we can only exist through our links. That's why I feel the need to go out and gather words from local people before starting my creations, and the need to maintain this link during the process. The link is a survival kit.

Kaori Ito