Fumiyo Ikeda / Un Yamada (BE/JP) amness

53% dance 28% music 19% word exchange

The two dancers and choreographers Fumiyo Ikeda and Un Yamada have been exchanging one word a day by email for some time. Fumiyo lives in Belgium, where she moved at the age of sixteen, making a career for herself over the past thirty years above all at Rosas, the company run by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Un, a few years younger, lives in Japan and only started working as a professional dancer later in life, albeit with her own company. In this way, the two women, who have similar roots but who embarked on very different dance careers, have developed a joint vocabulary of more than nine hundred words which serves as the starting point for the improvisation. The words they exchange – according to their rule – should have neither too much nor too little meaning. Like calamity, secret or colour.
Fumiyo and Un aren’t concerned about telling stories on stage. What counts for them is a common loss of time of unknowns that are known to each other, inter-relating two dance philosophies that include different forms of collaboration. Fumiyo has been involved in almost all major Rosas productions and also developed her own works together with Tim Etchells and Alain Platel. Un has also engaged in a number of more unusual collaborations – with mathematicians and physicists, for example. The duo is accompanied by the saxophone quintet of the BL!NDMAN collective founded by Eric Sleichim in Brussels and will play pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach, including amongst others his “Passacaglia”.