This project is co-produced by LUCIDA, a company based in Düsseldorf (Naoko TANAK, Japanese visual artist and Morgan NARDI, Italian choreographer) and KUBILAI KHAN INVESTIGATIONS – Centre for artistic cooperation based in the South of France (Ikue NAKAGAWA, Japanese dancer and Frank MICHELETTI, French dancer and choreographer).
The four artists met in Düsseldorf in the Summer of 2005, during a session of the Colina 05 programme (an artistic laboratory for artists who develop their work through exchanges between the various artistic media).

Their research territories were so close and complementary that they naturally started to develop a project together. Begun in the Summer of 2005 at Düsseldorf''s Tanzhaus, this work was developed throughout several artist-in-residence programmes during the Summer and Autumn of 2006: Düsseldorf, Hanover and Noisel / La Ferme du Buisson, where the creation was showed in October for the Festival Temps d''Images – Arte – La Ferme du Buisson.

In the middle of nowhere, enter a floating, crystalline world and discover the sleepy landscapes in your retinas. The sense of humour of Kubilai Khan Investigations, a duet of skating dancers with their feet wrapped in plastic bags, in a setting that looks more like an ice field than a stage, announces a few bright scenes, while the featherlike images of the Ludica group promise to cause a voluptuous and dazzling shock. The stage is no longer a place but a bubble that surrounds us. The images take shape in the movements, reflections creating doubles, reversals where our identities are disturbed. The stage turns into the receiving screen of light and vibration properties, of brief impressions where the bodies become at once more blurred and more accessible. Kubilai Khan Investigations/Ludica gathered around the idea that the outside is not an instrument of the inside, that there is not always a necessary distinction between the animated and the unanimated and that no substance is stable. Around this poetic, multipolar precipitate, transposed on stage, where everything is built in full sight, images are flowing, dragging the bodies into a kaleidoscopic circle, the sensation of a volume with multiple bases, each welcoming the delicate, fragile, mobile traces of our desires. Koko Doko is a tool case, an aptitude to disrupt the layers and surfaces.

Frank Micheletti, may 2006


Distribution: Ikue NAKAGAWA, Naoko TANAKA, Frank MICHELETTI, Morgan NARDI, Miguel CONSTANTINO - Audiopixel

Production: Ludica