Arts Centre Vooruit, Ghent, Belgium

ひび　hibi
ひ(hi) and び (bi), or “h” and “b”. They look alike. But when pronounced they sound completely different. When you put them next to each other they acquire meaning. Separately they also have a shape. Somehow. In some vague way. We somehow had to assemble these two seemingly meaningless, insignificant things.

日々　(hibi) “everyday”
The thoughts one arrives at through her body strike a chord with the other. Two years of e-mail correspondence leads to the beginning of “Hibi”. Every so many months, one visits the other’s country to rehearse. When we really shared the same space, what went back and forth between our bodies, via words or directly, was a vague kind of time-space, transcending that of simple sending and receiving. This string of seemingly insignificant but at the same time mysterious moments is the everyday itself.

皹　(hibi) ”crack”
As if wiping a cracked teacup gently so that it won’t break, or trying to put a crumbling rice cracker in one’s mouth in one piece. There is no need to explicitly mention little, casual challenges like that. But in fact all these seemingly insignificant things always brush against what we really want to say most.

Text (not used in Japan)

Two dancers briefly cross paths. They don’t meet again for a while but keep track of each other’s work. Periodically check the other’s online diary. Start up a conversation. A performance takes shape slowly. Through their electronic correspondence, mostly. Long distance. Between continents and time zones. Apart but linked. They send thoughts, lengthy responses. Revisit ideas, themes, and movements. Punctuated with quotations, intimate personal stories, small and large everyday life events.

“Hibi” echoes the story of its origin. What happens when these two dancers suddenly find themselves in the same space? What do they share? Where does one body end and the other begin? What happens to this space around and between them? As gesture slips into movement, everyday actions into strangeness, discontinuity into dance,… the choreography generates a peculiar kind of energy, appears to hover “in between”. “Hibi” embodies the tensions inherent in both meanings of this Japanese word: in the simultaneously continuous and discontinuous nature of the “everyday” – its constant rhythm always marked and interrupted by personal experiences and encounters – and in the “cracked” tea bowl, broken but not (yet) falling apart.