DEAR

In Japan, everyone assumes the right to live and converse with their ancestors and the deceased. The ghosts of the departed move among mortals, and it is possible to enter into a relationship with them. As a choreographer who gives body to the invisible and the intimate, Kaori Ito wanted to bring this belief of her country to life in the theater. Dance is a way of speaking with the dead, saying goodbye and forgiving the living. After a trilogy of autobiographical plays, Kaori Ito has given the stage over to Delphine Lanson, an actress of boundless vitality, and six powerful young dancers. All have written letters to their absent loved ones, to the dead who live inside them. Like a shaman, the actress speaks fragments of these letters, like a ritual for the afterlife. Whether they speak of loss, happy days, or the recomposition of the world of those who remain, the words take shape. Then the intense, explosively energetic dance - almost suicidal, as if it were the last - imposes itself as a language with the invisible. Transfigured by these incantations, charged with these stories, the 6 dancers are like spirits floating between two worlds, between two states of body. Neither here, nor elsewhere. Inevitably magnetized, they attract and repel each other, twirling back and forth between the intimate and the spiritual, until, in a shared trance, they irresistibly communicate the desire to live.

Chers was created in 2020, in parallel with the installation La parole Nochère at the Théâtre National de la Colline, a telephone booth for talking with the dead, inspired by the "wind telephone", an initiative of a resident of Otsuchi, Japan. La parole Nochère welcomed 200 people and collected the words of around a hundred, some of which were included in the show. During the performances, the TJP's telephone shack will become, as this installation has been, as the show is, a space-time where the here and the elsewhere, the living and the dead, can speak to each other.

Dancer and designer for 20 years, Kaori Ito seeks to bring out a vital movement that connects bodies and brings into existence the void, the invisible and the sacred. Born in Japan into a family of artists, she studied classical dance from an early age, followed by modern dance in New York. A performer for over 10 years with major European companies, she felt the need to create her own company in order to develop her artistic approach and choreographic writing. She founded the Himé company in 2015. After an autobiographical trilogy, she returned to her Japanese culture, which inspired her to create, in 2020, the first piece in which she is not on stage. Convinced of the need to make children's voices heard and to give their creativity a place, in 2021 she begins creating with and for young audiences. At the crossroads of cultures and languages, currents, practices and disciplines, Kaori Ito is developing a hybrid artistic vocabulary and a creative approach based on contemporary rituals. Driven by the desire to carry forward a project that dreams the future with young people and gives it substance through art, Kaori Ito is dedicating herself to this wish in 2023 by taking over the direction of the TJP, Centre Dramatique National de Strasbourg. Her aim is to turn it into a transdisciplinary, intercultural and intergenerational theater that promotes the cross-disciplinary nature of art, the importance of children's questioning and their involvement in the creative process.