Tatjana Jankovic, a professional film editor, spent better than four years of her own time and money making her documentary film Kaori Ito un corps impatient (“Kaori Ito: an impatient body”). Kaori Ito has danced with most of France’s better-known choreographers, including Angelin Preljocaj, James Thierrée, Philippe Decouflé or Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and, especially, Alain Platel; Ito is today a strengthening choreographic presence as well as performer.
Including 19 full days filming in 17 different settings, an unknown number of nights and weekends cutting, splicing and synthesizing video, Jankovic’s Un corps follows the twists and turns of what might be called Ito’s “body about life” performance into 2017.
So, Un corps impatient must be a labor of love, mustn't it? Of “a labor of love” the OED says, “a task done for pleasure, not reward,” pleasure and reward being apparently mutually exclusive. After spending part of an evening and an afternoon talking with Jankovic, I’m inclined to believe that her labor, like Ito’s dance, is rather an affair of the magic of life, which is its own reward.
Jankovic and I met at a screening of another documentary about one of Ito’s more recent performances, Je danse parce que je me méfie des mots (“I dance because I don’t trust words”). In that first conversation, she began telling me that she fell in love with Ito – “Ito” being “Ito’s dance” – through a short film, just a long clip really, called quagma.
– My attention began wandering as, listening to Jankovic tell me about Ito’s oeuvre, I realized I hadn’t at all understood Je danse parce que je me méfie des mots.
About Je me méfie. In a fit of displaced paternal pique – or just plain projection? – I had turned around and told Ito, who just happened to be sitting behind me during the screening – smiling broadly of course; something we all learn early in Ohio – that she deserved a spanking for impertinence. I said something Lou Grant-growly like: Let’s let the dads do a dance and call it “Impertinent Pups plus”.
I found myself muttering responses to the questions Ito fires across the stage at her Dad: “Of course, girlie, of course I took money from your mother – she’s my woman-friend, after all – of course I looked sideways at your brother – he’s my son, after all; if I don’t look askance on his grandeur, who will ever again dare? – of course, girlie, I have my quirks and crannies, I was me once, myself, before my woman-friend got fat from that crazy idea we had…
I asked myself bitterly, why wouldn’t-shouldn’t Hiroshi Ito have his quirks and crannies? The one thing I was sure Ito-the elder and I share is the experience of too frequently being mistaken as a father.
But I was wrong about all that.
What Jankovic was telling me was that Ito used her body to talk – that the talk was like the mask and marionette, which also figure and disappear. And also that, if I'd actually watched old Ito-père, I would have seen that he, Hiroshi, was there, what he is, was, always has been.
At some point in this evening, too, Kaori Ito announced she was pregnant. Her first child.
I made a date to talk again with Jankovic in the Parc des Buttes de Chaumont, convenient for both of us. Believe it or not, in 30 years of living almost next door to it, I’d never set foot in it. Familiarity breeds ignorance, I expect, in the same way as ignorance breeds familiarity; Buttes de Chaumont is a modest allotment of paradise: thank Napoléon III for thinking that working folk could do with their own private Idaho, just like the bourgeois Bois de Boulogne.
As Jankovic and I walked along, scouting for a café, the bridges and peaks and valleys and winding paths and mists and sun beams of the Buttes – all news to me – whispered that William Blake was right: Hell and Heaven are one and all the rest depends on how one feels in the moment.
We finally found a café. As we were taking a seat, I noticed that our somewhat facetious server had a Mary Poppins silhouette tattooed on the back of her arm.
So, I asked her, “What’s it like to be almost perfect?”
Pursing her lips, she replied, “Not too bad,” and swaggered off.
“I dedicated the documentary to my father the artist, to the artist who was also my father,” Jankovic says – observing that this might have given her a way into understanding what Kaori had to dance about Hiroshi, also an artist, in Je danse parce que je me méfie des mots.
Jankovic, who was born in Serbia – “a meaningful fact” for which she entertains “no nostalgia” – explains that her Dad, a top-class, aspiring singer of Serbian folk songs in Serbian, believed he might best be able to work out his artistic destiny, calm his demons, in France, where people speak French and which has and its own country and past.
“You know,” Jankovic says, à propos, “The relation father-daughter is the most beautiful of the impossible loves. With a mother, whether you are a son or a daughter, there is always maternity butting in – needs, answered and unanswered needs – that inform mother-love with the reality of noodles at the end of the month … But with dad-love, well, it’s all just wish and wanting.”
“Come to think of it,” she continues thoughtfully, “It must have been the scent of the father-daughter subject in Kaori’s work that first brought me to follow her…”
Jankovic’s fascination is met by real-life wish fulfillment.Some time after seeing the quagma piece, Jankovic, who has danced herself, had the opportunity to see Ito live. She was more fascinated than ever. She comments, “Kaori is completely herself, she doesn’t have to give herself (on stage) because she is already present, mixing real experience and general ideas just right.”
“I met her by chance. It turns out she lives in the street adjoining mine. In talking, I tell her that I want to make a film about her.”
Ito says ‘Yes’ to the film, but cautions that other offers had never panned out.
Jankovic feels encouraged by this. “So, I accompany Kaori to Lyon, where I see SOLO. And she finds a cameraman in Philippe Gasnier (who later leaves the project) and sets out to follow Kaori Ito into her daily life.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Jankovic says, “By ‘following’ I don’t mean getting into her private life, into her ‘intimité’…” but rather, she clarifies, she looks to capture the “the intimacy with self that enables Ito’s creativity.”
And capturing that intimacy could only come by following Ito as she worked on and developed her performances.
“Life, my life, your life, is a synonym for creation,” Jankovic remarks. “To be alive you’ve got to get out of your own little patch… And that’s what was happening then … I had fallen into a situation that was so rich that I just let go the idea of a scenario and went for the themes that I saw Kaori working on for her audiences.”
“Kaori’s objective is to talk about the body, to talk about her own body and what she does/has done/did with it,” Jankovic says. “As a filmmaker, I became, I am, an accomplice of Ito’s artistic project.”
To back her up, Jankovic cites Ito’s performance Réligieuse à la fraise with Olivier Martin-Salvan
“That piece is linked to Je me méfie des mots,” she says, “Because Kaori found that the best way to communicate with her Dad was through the body, through the dance of the body…
And that’s the intention behind my film, too, to talk about the body, to talk about the human body.”
The server comes by. I ask her for the tab. “Miss Poppins,” I joke, “A little magic here, please.”
Jankovic notices another tattoo on the Poppins. “Xavier,” it reads.
“Isn’t that inconvenient if you change boyfriends?” laughs Jankovic. “Or do you make them change names?”
“Xavier’s my Dad,” Mary Poppins replies and swaggers off.
So it’s a little of both.
