Asahi Performing Arts Award-Winner

Exploring the “now” in the raw body

Dancer and choreographer Ikuyo Kuroda’s stunning debut “Side B” was showered with major awards, including the Toyota Choreography Award 2003 and a Rencontres Chorégraphiques Internationales de Seine-Saint Denis prize.

Recently contemporary dance has moved towards the conceptual, jettisoning the emphasis placed on a dancer’s privileged physique. Kuroda, however, continues to cause shockwaves through the dance world with her adherence to the purity of the body and well-honed physicality. All the members of her all-female dance troupe BATIK are trained in classical ballet. The dancers push their bodies to an extreme where nothing can be hidden and where everything is exposed.

Kuroda’s work is often described as vivid and graphic. When she turns internal impulses into dance she does not beautify it. Impulse as impulse, sexuality as sexuality, life as life: the audience is engulfed by its intensity.

“Flowers flow, time congeals”

BATIK’s breakthrough work “Flowers flow, time congeals” was first performed at the Saison Theater Program in March 2004. Kuroda’s unique choreography created a huge buzz, as well as the audacity of its gripping subject matter and the spectacular climax, featuring the dancers continuously climbing and descending a three-metre ladder.

The work seeks to capture the momentary sensation of timing stopping still. In life we cannot beat time. Time is a thing conjoined to the past and intertwined with the expectations of the future, every kind of emotion and complication. The performance extracts an entire emotion from time and exposes the moment.

For this revival for Festival/Tokyo BATIK will be amplifying the impact of the original work even more. Further, Kuroda’s acclaimed use of space will be energized by the specially constructed theater in the former junior high school gymnasium, the Nishi-Sugamo Arts Factory.

Kuroda’s arrival in the international Festival/Tokyo program signals her as a leading choreographer in Japan, one whose output across the world will be developing full-throttle in the years to come.