Fumiyo Ikeda/Alain Platel /Benjamin Verdonck

NINE FINGER

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November 20-22 h 8.30pm, november 23 h 5pm

PALLADIUM national prèmiere

Three energetic personalities active on the Belgian scene but with different origins and artistic backgrounds; dancer Fumiyo Ikeda, the guru of theatre-dance Alain Platel and performer, dancer and mime artist Benjamin Verdonck combine forces for a pressingly physical performance of a disturbing emotive impact with its feet firmly planted in the present. The protagonist of Nine finger is an African “child soldier”, as the media would call him, or a “beast without a nation” according to the title of the novel by Uzodinma Iweala which inspired the performance. His name is Agu and his story is told in a nutshell, for this is not a work that sets out to be a denouncement in the traditional sense.
In Iweala’s novel the language regresses and breaks up as it recounts scenes of inconceivable violence: in “Nine finger” it is the springboard for launching into a journey through the child’s universe, where all theatre languages are used, and are in turn made to regress until they decompose. Verdonck interprets the interior voices of the child which ceaselessly tell him how bad he is; Ikeda intones his voice and lifts his movements as though he were his shadow. She is the elsewhere, the mother, the friends and the life that are now far away and absent. Two opposite figures that analyse the impulses, emotions and feelings of the child soldier, an enquiry which, as always with Platel, opens out into a psychological  whirlwind. A world that is portrayed by the relentless physicality of the two very different protagonists: one woman and one man, one Asian and one European, one tall the other short and, note carefully, neither of the two is African.
A minimalist stage with common objects like a box, a microphone, plastic bags, a mattress and a fake tree, and sound which is left to the noises of the birds in the forest; together they form the web of a world and are enough to be called home, boat, camp or devastated landscape. A fiery blend of dance and theatre, Nine finger tells a powerful story of a terrible world without indulging the grim, but with humanity, irony at times, and always with poetry.

Fumiyo Ikeda, born in 1962 in Osaka. In 1979, she entered MUDRA, the dance school directed by Maurice Béjart, where she met Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. In 1983 she joined the newly-founded company Rosas. Between 1983 and 1992 she contributed to the creation of and danced in all the productions. Alongside her activity within Rosas, Fumiyo Ikeda also worked with Steve Paxton, has participated in films and several theatre plays.
Benjamin Verdonck was born in 1972 and completed his studies on 1 April 1995 at the Royal Flemish Music Conservatory in Antwerp in the Stage arts/ Dora Van Der Groen section. He acted in the Southern Theatre  and the Hollandia Theatre Group  after which he did musical theatre shows in co-operation with Valentine Kempynck and the Music workshop Think of One. From 2000 he has focused on investigating the power and functions of theatricality in a public space.
Alain Platel - born in Ghent in 1956- was trained as a remedial educationalist. At an early age he already showed a big interest in arts and theatre. He founded ‘Les Ballets Contemporains de la Belgique’in 1986. It’s difficult to pigeon-hole Platel’s work and this mere fact expresses itself in his choice of dancers and actors: he places professionals next to amateurs, children next to adults, out of diverse cultures and all layers of society. The imperfect and the vulnerable are the starting points of his work, that distinguishes itself through it’s humour, vitality and seeming chaos.