CARLOTTA IKEDA

« One day or another, all children have danced. Many do not remember.

Sanae Ikeda was born in Fukui, a village on the Japanese Sea: « I used to walk in the country, and dizzy with all the smells of the plants, with all the nuances in the atmosphere, I danced ».

The kind of dance you learn came later, in Tokyo. « Rice sprout » (Sanae) was 19 when she first went through the door of a « dance course ». But at that time, the Butô, that « dance of darkness » was born in Japan. Tatsumi Hijikata had invented it, that angel and devil who was to proclaim in 1968 the revolt of the flesh. « I was at Tokyo University, I had learned dance, worked with the classical technique, which remains the basis to know one s own body ; but then I found myself in front of a wall. Seeing Hijikata in the 70's, I understood how I could overcome it. », confessed she, who was to become Carlotta Ikeda, named after Carlotta Grisi, famous dancer in the end of the XIXth century. Is there something, beyond the cultural and temporal differences, above styles as different as romantic ballet and Butô, a sort of absolute sprit of dance ? This may well be a sign of it.

Tatsumi Hijikataís first performances had drawn their inspiration from Genêt, Lautréamont, Sade... Consequently, Butô was first seen as something rather sulphurous. That « theatre of revulsion, convulsion, repulsion », where « crushed, larval, twisted, electric, stiff bodie » are being tormented (according to Jean Baudrillard), has been the deliberately marginal laboratory of a changing Japan, still living with the the trauma of WW II and of Hiroshima. Like other young people in her generation, Carlotta threw her body into battle. This life-long involvement can by no means be regarded as naiveorinnocent. But childish : in Carlotta Ikeda, childhood never ceased to dance. One has difficulty with such a statement looking at a photo of Carlotta in Erotic soul dance, one of her first shows on the last page of Érotique du Japon, by Théo Lesoulac. Her wideopened body, with breasts and genitals barded with ironworking tools, reminds us of some sadomasochist ordeal. But the same body is also wrapped in a paper dress: flower-woman, butterfly, there the image of birth dominates.