Japanese dancer Kaori Ito explores relationship with her father

To celebrate meeting up with her father again after returning from abroad, the Japanese dancer and choreographer Kaori Ito presents a show – at once indelicate and poetic – that explores their relationship.

I Dance because I Do Not Trust Words is a love story, an attempt to re-create what was lost or perhaps never existed. An encounter between a father and a daughter distanced and transformed by ten years and thousands of kilometres of separation. It is the expression of a love and a mutual respect beyond words.

What were the choreographic challenges of this show for you?
Kaori Ito: As my father wasn't a dancer, I have been very attentive to everything he does when I am onstage with him. It's not like when I dance with a colleague: he is very old, and frail too, and sometimes he forgets things. In rehearsal, I discovered that he is very professional – he marks his blocking with tape. He is like us: he understood very quickly what has to be done. It's quite surprising, but at the same time, I continue to be very careful.

A lot of emotions speak to me through him and resonate in me. I pay attention to him every evening, because it's never the same show. So I have trained myself to remain very stable, to maintain the same emotion and to change nothing in the scenes. I have the impression that, with my father, I have been fortunate to have an opportunity to learn how one can be fragile onstage and manage very well.

You say you dance because you distrust words, and yet these words are at the heart of the show?
Ito: That's the paradox: we use words to communicate, even if they sometimes cause problems. Ever since I was little, I have had trouble with words, because I could never talk well and that's why I sought my own language with the body. And that really saved me. While we were working on the show, my father told me that when he was involved in the theatre, fifty years ago, he asked an actress he was directing whether she could redo a scene, more poetically.

She answered that she was doing it already. She hadn't understood him. He told me that at that moment he became aware of the limitations of words in communication. That's why he gave up the theatre and took up sculpture. It was a way for him to find his own language. It was weird to hear that from my father's mouth while I was working on words.

This show celebrates the reunion in words that are sometimes indelicate.
Ito: In a way, it's a settling of scores – sorting out onstage what is not said in our family. So it is very intimate, but at the same time I believe we have achieved something universal in which people can, through us, project their relationships with their own fathers. I don't think the show has to have a message, but it should ask you questions.

Each spectator can examine the relationships with his or her own parents.
Ito: That's it, it's as if one has all these emotions inside that are hot, but once one takes them out, they cool down a bit. When the emotions stay inside, you can't work on them. It takes a certain distance or a dose of humour to succeed in doing so. That's what I have realised after doing this piece with my father.

> I Dance because I Do Not Trust Words. 28/03 > 30/03, 20.00, Les Halles, Schaarbeek