Nine Finger

Nine Finger is the first collaboration project by the dancer Fumiyo Ikeda, the actor Benjamin Verdonck and the choreographer Alain Platel.

Using body, text, musical refrains and news photographies Ikeda and Verdonck convey a chaotic world experience. The performance used only a few props; a big cardboard box, a worn-down mattress and two microphones were onstage.

Katleen Van Langendonck wrote the following article about Nine Finger by Fumiyo Ikeda, Benjamin Verdonck and Alain Platel:

"Introduction:

Every meeting is a movement. Three remarkable personalities magnetize themselves, for the first time, at the heart of a common project: Fumiyo Ikeda, one of Rosas’s dancers from the start, Benjamin Verdonck, actor and performer who likes to make public spaces strange, and Alain Platel, choreographer of the Ballets C. de la B. Three sensibilities at once complicit and different and three talented artists. This constellation itself anticipates intensity, as the three of them face images of havoc that the present sends them. They compose a living essay on upheaval, personal or collective. A primer for exterior signs of distress, for the emotional tempest stirred up by macro or micro events. Through the dancing body, through speaking objects, cult-like ritornellos, and news photographs, another movement is set going, that of a speech on the chaotic experience of the world – those in this world, active and reactive, photosensitive.

The dance of the horse by Katleen Van Langendonck: For the Nine Finger project, three personalities and an extraordinary series of achievements have joined forces. Japanese dancer Fumiyo Ikeda, who met Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker at Béjart's dance school Mudra and has barely left her side ever since, is perhaps the most expressive and emotional dancer at Rosas. Benjamin Verdonck combines creations for the auditorium with performances in public spaces, based on the feelings aroused in him by current affairs. Alain Platel is known throughout the world for the dance theatre productions that he has created together with his company Les Ballets C de la B, and the theatre trilogy that he has produced with Arne Sierens. Platel is like a link in the space between theatre and dance, even though you cannot classify any of these performers/creators under a single heading

Nine finger/Negen vinger*: The title of their shared adventure is interesting on a number of different levels. Nine Finger is nine, or three times three. Three encounters, and three sets of memories, ideas and possibilities. Dance, theatre and dance theatre. Text, body and object. Antwerp, Brussels and Ghent. And what is more: Japan, Palestine, Africa. Nine Finger also refers to the fingers that make up two hands, the most direct resources that the body uses to express itself in the language of gestures. And yet 'nine' and the singular 'finger' points to a lack, something missing or absent. This tentativeness points not only to the show which is being created at the time of writing, but to a necessary incompleteness that has to be supplemented by the audience. The metaphor of building as trial and error binds these three creators together and returns as an image in this production. Verdonck built a hut for himself on a crane on Bara square and nestled in a bird's nest beside the administrative centre of Brussels. Platel has set a slice of life on the stage in the living room of Mother and Child and put two houses on the stage in All Indian. The oeuvre of Rosas also contains a constant interplay between building up and breaking down, both in the dance material and, for example in the scenery (consider I said I or April me).

Nine finger/Negen vinger/Neger nigger*: Nine Finger is also reminiscent of the counting rhyme Ten little niggers. On the rehearsal table we find Beasts of no nation by Uzodinma Iweala, an almost intolerable testimony from a child soldier. There is also the film Darwin's Nightmare about the influence of globalisation on poverty around Lake Victoria. And finally Arna's children, the story of a number of Palestinians who produced plays in a school set up by an Israeli Jewish woman and later joined the armed resistance or became martyrs. A shared concern over events in the world drives these creators together. Verdonck, in a letter to Platel and Ikeda, says: "I assume that as a Westerner we are so corrupt that it is impossible to live and act in a very consistent way". Each one of them has expressed responses to American foreign policy in the past. Verdonck revived performer Joseph Beuys in I like America and America likes me when he spent three days in a cage in the company of a pig, to express his incredulity and confusion over the impending American invasion of Iraq. Platel created the Mozart production Wolf in which dancers burn an American and an Israeli flag on the stage and a pack of dogs depict the collective fear. And Ikeda was involved in creating Kassandra, a contemporary version of the Trojan war, rewritten by Oscar van Woensel, in which, as the mother-figure, they offered a positive voice juxtaposed with the male violence.

Nine finger/Negen vinger/Neger nigger/Nee grrr geen/Regen*: The audience should not expect an explicit message. This is "aestheticising events that cannot be aestheticised", as Verdonck says in the same letter. Theatre has to link the political to the personal, the emotional. The greatest possible variety is built on minimal basic contradictions such as man/woman and laughter/tears. Retrograde movements, accelerated, slowed down and isolated, in a search within the areas of tension between emotion and structure. Ikeda is used to working with a fixed form - music - to which the energetic body offers some resistance, but for Platel the movement is usually in the opposite direction: long improvisations unleash unknown emotions, which are then linked together to form a faultless montage. Nine Finger starts out from simple objects - house, boat, horse, plastic bag, snow - which shift from one meaning to another on the stage. The spoken language is necessary and elementary: short words and onomatopoeias. The word as a reduced movement. Language becomes above all body language, and presentation becomes performance. What is missing in Nine Finger is also a formal search for separateness while together. Man and Woman form a duet, which they then dance alone. Man describes the objects that make Woman think of Man. Woman stands alone on the stage, and the voice of Man describes what is happening. Nine Finger as a concentration of meanings, as a distorted drawing. Nine Finger or the mattress which becomes a house and later a boat to sail away."

Katleen Van Langendonck

*Negen vinger is Dutch for Nine Finger. Neger nigger explains itself, Nee grrr geen means something along the line of No, grrr, no and Regen can be translated to Rain.

Sources: BIT Teatergarasjen, spring program 2007. 08.09.2010: http://www.bit-teatergarasjen.no/article/64

Vallat, Marianne Dyrnes, Kristian Seltun and Nina Magnus (2007). Black Box Teater Oslo: Program spring 2007. Black Box Teater Oslo [Oslo]

"Verdonck’s incarnation of the child soldier’s story, in interaction with the expressive dance of Ikeda, does not just lead to abstract images for an awful story, but a physical experience of text fragments, a cardboard house and a dirty mattress. Here the child’s longing for home, playing and uncontrolled acts of violence run berserk. (...) Poor things, all our monster children, I think, while I swallow and swallow and at the same time remember to be grateful there are artists like these. In all their disgusting innocence."

Høyland, Elin (23.02.2007). Review titled Monsterbarn (literally: Monster Children). Morgenbladet, morgenbladet.no, http://www.morgenbladet.no/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070223/OKULTUR/102230012/0/KULTUR

"Ikeda and Verdonck copies the moving, simple narration techniques of the book. They switch between innocent playing and unmistakable references to images from our times’ news images with sections from the book as a frame. Childish playing soon becomes reality as we are reminded of the vulnerability of the human body and mind. The serious downside of the performance breaks through in raw physicality and powerful outbreaks."

Fieldseth, Melanie (25.07.2007). Review titled Nådeløst og nakent (literally: Ruthless and naked). Bergens Tidende, bt.no, 19.11.2010, http://www.bt.no/bergenpuls/scene/article343429.ece