Session House Annual Report 2018: Asami Ida

What Drives Me

　Maria Kong, to which I have belonged for four years, was a young company founded in 2008 by four former Batsheva dancers, and it placed great emphasis on creation. We rehearsed five days a week from noon to 7 p.m., and gave performances and toured. With six members from Israel, Russia, Brazil, France, and Japan, it was a richly international company. Not confined to theaters, we performed outdoors, rented entire club halls, and actively collaborated with various artists and technologies, attempting new connections between dance and society.

 

　Dance is an art of the body and expresses a person. In other words, you glimpse that person’s humanity and life. In Israel, I realized the importance of living a human life. When I was in Japan, being busy was a status symbol, and I think I felt reassured as my planner filled with appointments. But I came to know the richness of heart and the wonder of encountering moments that move it: feeling time pass leisurely on a day off, talking with friends, looking at landscapes and plants and finding them beautiful. In life, when a choice has appeared before me, I have chosen the direction that makes my heart stir. Because then, even if the path I choose is difficult, I have the strength to face it with conviction.

 

　My director often told me, “Do not lie, Do mistake (Don’t lie; make mistakes).” I remember being shaken at first: mistakes are forbidden, I can’t do that! Is there a director who tells you to fail before a performance? But this means not following a fixed form, but expressing what is real in that moment, valuing the freshness born from averting a mistake as it happens. Real expression does not mean dance emotionally. It means asking what emotions drive me. Of course, as the arts have the expression “breaking the mold,” you need a mold before you can break it; I think this presupposes a foundation of technique—form.

 

　And now I have made a major choice that makes my heart stir. It is to return to Japan and continue creating works, and to dance once more with the people I love who built my foundation! The quality of Japanese dancers is truly wonderful. This is something I want proudly to proclaim to the world! I want to meet you all, share experiences, and be present together at moments when our hearts are moved.

 

　But contemporary dance is still marginal in Japan. It does not receive commensurate compensation, and securing time to engage with dance itself is not easy. Drawing on my experience overseas, I also feel it is my mission to broaden dance activities and
create places where dancers belong. To establish places where dancers can live as dancers, and to tell them not to stay within the mold, but to go on making mistakes. Unexpected possibilities open out from there.

 

I want to enrich my dance life in Japan from now on, as though pouring myself out with the people I can meet now and the emotions that exist only now.

 

Asami Ida

 

Excerpt from Session House Annual Report 2018
Photograph from the performances on December 23 and 24, 2018
UDC Afters: “Back to That Theater Once More!”
Asami Ida’s “Love Is Like a Bird—Love Is Like a Wild Bird—”