JP/1/ITOH
Kim Itoh: Last dance at Art Summit 2004
Kim Itoh & The Glorious Future will be the last dance performance at Art Summit Indonesia 2004.
The company can be seen at 8 p.m. on Oct. 8 and Oct. 9 at Gedung Kesenian Jakarta, Central Jakarta.
The double bill due to be performed will be Dead and Alive -- Body on the borderline and F.T.
Dubbed the "bad boy of Butoh", 30-something Kim Itoh's choreography is daring and thought-provoking: an eclectic and, on occasion, twisted fusion of post-Butoh movement and contemporary dance.
Kim Itoh trained in Butoh, the expressive Japanese postwar avant-garde dance form, arguably the most significant Asian influence on the world's contemporary dance lexicon to date, under Anzu Furukawa.
In 1990 he started doing solos, and finally founded his own company, Kim Itoh & The Glorious Future, five years later. He has been performing around the world since, winning critical acclaim, including several dance awards, both at home and abroad.
Inspired by novelist Saiichi Maruya's comment, "the modern Japanese are neither alive nor dead, machine man-types who obey orders without thinking", Dead and Alive -- Body on the borderline is a powerful piece, a scrutinized exploration of the body, at the convergence between being dead and alive, questioning non-functional existence.
Accompanied by music by Mendelssohn and Ravel, an onstage dancer (Kim Itoh with his head covered) knee-sweeps the floor in front of three male (semi-nude) dancers, composing a quartet whose movements contrive to be both serious and funny at the same time.
The repertoire is Kim Itoh's answer to the question "what is a truly living body?", a poetic account indeed, yet thrilling as well.
The second piece, F.T, reveals another side of Kim Itoh, whose choreographic theme is based on the extraordinary quality in ordinary everyday life, expressed with a touch of sarcasm and humor.
A dance imbued by the science-fiction story of three young girls whose world is invaded by an alien insect, this piece is delivered in a manner that is theatrical, cheeky, manic, ironic and comically over-toned, making it difficult to categorize.
He fuses post-Butoh expressive contemporary dance, disturbing ballet steps, Western theater plus movement music and lighting into a witty stage picture.
Sankai Juku's eloquent performance at Art Summit I (1995) was one of the first Butoh revivals.
Kim Itoh's is the latest, critical description of what Japanese theater critic Otori Hidenaga, who presented a paper at the Arts Summit seminar, described as the "body in dementia" phenomenon in Japanese society.