Surfing on the waves of the transient and temporary
Steven De Belder - june 2009

in pieces is a collaboration between dancer Fumiyo Ikeda and director, author and artist Tim Etchells.

Fumiyo Ikeda has danced with Rosas for at least 25 years and in the last few years has developed a new direction in her work, a series of performances made in cooperation with other directors, choreographers and performers. It is not so much that she wants to be a performing chameleon capable of taking on any style, rather that she draws other artistic worlds into her own. In 2007 she made the raw Nine finger with Benjamin Verdonck and Alain Platel, and now there is in pieces, a solo created together with Tim Etchells, artistic director of the British company Forced Entertainment, which has also been at the vanguard of the performing arts for around 25 years. Etchells and Ikeda have often appeared on the same stages and festivals, but it was not until Kaaitheater director Guy Gypens suggested it that they joined forces. Like Ikeda, Etchells also wants to explore new directions. This collaboration fits into a strand of projects outside of the company he leads. He published a novel called The Broken World (2008), works in the context of visual arts and wrote and directed That Night Follows Day (2007), a performance by sixteen children for Victoria (now CAMPO), and Sight is the Sense... (2008) for American actor Jim Fletcher.

in pieces started as an open enquiry, a journey of ideas, individual words, pieces of writing, improvisation, movements, lists, tasks and so on. The performance presents microscopic and personal perspectives on such subjects as memory and nothingness, stories and structures, emotions and identity. in pieces starts from a straightforward wonder about these themes and their interconnections exploring them not as abstract ideas but as concrete events and texts presented on stage.

We often imagine our memory to be a neatly ordered archive that, given the right instructions, can be searched, and where elements we consider less important fade with time, to be replaced by new experiences. However, on closer examination, the whole process of memorising, storage and retrieval turns out to be much more unpredictable. It is a process that takes place on the border between the conscious and the unconscious. Our identity is an event, a shaky construction of recollections, stories, emotions and auxiliary constructions. What we forget, what fails or escapes our grasp is as important as our memories and achievements. Language is only an imperfect and ambiguous aid. We have no instruction manuals for ourselves, and we are constantly engaged in summarising ourselves for ourselves and others, often with tragic or comical consequences.

In the performance, Fumiyo Ikeda is alone on stage and as she dances and speaks, she recollects. She draws up lists and structures of memories, personal and general, physical and mental, trivial and crucial, old and recent. Ikeda and Etchells zoom in on the openness of memory and the flexibility with which data are ordered and reordered. They explore the infectiousness of remembering and the chain reactions that lead from one memory to the next, from one person to another, from the performer to the spectator. Words and movement pass the ball back and forth to each other.

Mobilising memory means finding ways of gaining access to its content, thinking up structures to gain temporary control of meanings and processes, or ways of temporarily controlling the chaos of reality, which is reflected in the chaos of memory and the abundance of possible views on the same event. in pieces surfs on the waves of the transient and temporary. It is not a portrait, but a sketch of possibilities, an invitation to remember too, to project our own stories, thoughts and meanings onto those of Ikeda and Etchells. in pieces aims to be a porous performance: solid and tangible, yet at the same time permeable. A piece that breathes and urges us to breathe too.