ISMAEL IVO

APOCALYPSE

A piano stands left stage. It covers almost one quarter of the space. When Kako starts playing Ivo, who is lying in the middle of the stage, begins to move slowly.
The piano plays a warm melody with a touch of sadness. The movements of the dancer recall the birth of life, or the joy of awakening after a long sleep. This is the prelude of the performance. The audience watches very carefully with tension, when suddenly the music attaks with strong chords. The dancer jumps; the music becomes rhythmical, the dance much more dynamic.
The music flows freely with changes of tempo. The musical immage marries with the dance in a wonderful emsemble, a perfect result. While Kako attaks with broken harmonies, a recorded piano music is heard.

Ivo catches the rhythm, swings, runs and turns all over the stage in a wild dance. Sweat runs over his amber coloured body looking like a perfect sculpture, and he succeeds in expressing contradictory feelings such as pleasure and discontent at the same time. The musical dialogue between the two musics goes on with sustained tension. And the dancer at the end suggests that he is brought into an infinite world.

This performance really looks like a fight between the dancer and the musician. It leaves us breathless for one hour.
Yomiuri Newspaper Tokyo, July 1,1989

ZWEI MäNNER IM AUSDRUCKSRAUSCH
Die Angst und Niedergeschlagenheit der Existenz, nicht nur die der Apokalypse, sondern auch die des Alltags, ist bei dieser Choreographie allgegenwärtig. Der ewige Widerstreit von Leben und Tod, Niederfallen ud Aufstehen ist schon lange nicht mehr in dieser Brutalität dargestellt worden. Hart prallt der Körper auf den Boden, krümmt sich, um sich daraufhin wieder aufzurappeln. Takashi Kako läßt in solchen Augenblicken das Klavier alleine weiterspielen und schaut zu. Es ist faszinierendes Tanztheater, das Ivo hier vollbringt.
AZ Tagblatt, 22. August 1989

POETISCHE KöRPERSPRACHE
Choreographiert von Ivo und musikalisch gestaltet von Takashi Kako zeigt dieses Aufeinandertreffen von Ivos südamerikanisch-afrikanischen mit Kakos asiatisch-europäischen Elementen die Aufarbeitung einer inneren Apopokalypse, den individuellen Verfall eines Menschen.
Ivo zeigt ein Gemälde aus Emotionen – Angst, Lächeln, Schreien -, Zerstreuung und Feinfühligkeit. Er verläuft sich, findet sich wieder zwischen zwei gegenüberliegenden Türen: Herz und Intellekt, Muskeln und Vergeistigung. Die mystische Suche nach den Wurzeln des Seins, der Lebensweg von der Geburt über die Erkenntnis des eigenen Ich bis zum Tod wird zum künstlerischen Ausdruck.
Ivos Tanz, sein bedingungsloses Eintauchen in poetisches Körpergefühl, gepaart mir urwüchsiger Kraft, vermittelt die gesamte Intensität eines zerrissenen Menschen.
Volkstimme August 1989

DANCE AS CYCLICAL MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH
The T2 auditorium at Stuttgart’s Theaterhaus is packed, the Ivo community is large and quick to show their enthusiasm. The beginning of the Apocalypse tour couldn’t have been more fascinating. Enormous applause at the end, Ivo is moved, and everyone amazed by the continued vitality of a Brazilian dancer who has been causing sensation after sensation on the European dance scene for over 20 years with his eccentric, very physical performances.
Dietholf Zerweck, Ludwigsburger Kreiszeitung August 19, 2006

A SPIRAL IN TIME
Dreamily feeling one’s way, heavenly exuberant. Self-tormenting fall, breathless silence.
Apocalypse renounces on all artistic codes. The audience is totally spellbound.
The apocalypse, this dialogue shows, begins already at birth. But there is still time to live, to dare departure and rebellion. Syncopated dissonances are driving the dancer to sculptural distortions. Jazzy staccatos are chasing him across the stage to in 2/8 time. Dangling and gyrating, childlike and graceful; the left arm is bent, skywards, as if slightly disabled, a whim of nature. But stumbling then – or nearly hopping, announcing disaster. Kako opens his arms wide. The deepest bass and highest soprano spill out of the grand piano’s belly. Ivo opens his mouth in a silent scream. The notes are ascending chromatically, transferred synchronously into grimly reaping movements. A frenzied danse macabre begins.
Brigitte Jähnigen, Stuttgarter Nachrichten, August 19, 2006

THE ETERNAL CYCLE OF LIFE AND DEATH
A dancer, a man at the piano, that is all. More is not necessary. The tension guiding the dialogue between dancer and composer, the Brazilian and the Japanese, is felt immediately.
Slowly, very slowly, Ismael Ivo moves, as soon as Kako plays the first notes. The melody is delicate, even melancholy in its longing openness. Ivo’s movements to it are measured, poetic. Like a flower unfolding its blossom, he reaches upwards, following with his torso inch by inch, stretches and bends his fingers, running them over his knee, as if he was a newborn finding out what to do with these odd extremities.
These are scenes of an awakening, a kind of birth of consciousness, maybe even the dawn of the history of mankind, where every detail counts. After repeated moments of stillness, when one could have heard a needle drop, Takashi Kako begins hammering away madly at the keyboard. Ismael Ivo responds equally powerfully to the hard, often jazzy chords. His choreography, up to now restrained, gains dynamics without losing concentration. He becomes one with the syncopated rhythm, clenching his fists exactly in time, jumps, runs to all for corners, turning his open mouth skywards in a silent scream, as if he was begging for manna. Finally, his movements seem not unlike whirls of a dervish.
For seventy minutes now, dancer and pianist have wrestled with each other, showing that the term apocalypse, which naturally creates high-flown expectations, can do without horsemen, and that the eternal cycle of outset, suffering and death can also be individually apocalyptic.
This has something to do with Kako’s virtuosity and Ivo’s charismatic craft.
Petra Mostbacher Dix, Stuttgarter Zeitung August 19, 2006

PERISHING
’Every day I die, which is why I am alive.’ It is this awareness, a paradox at first glance, which Ismael Ivo revolves around in ’Apocalypse’, turning our Western thinking on its head, or rather on its feet. It is emphatically not about seeing life as the absence of death. Ismael Ivo’s solo is also a duet. It is the unusual encounter between the Berlin based dancer with Afro-Brazilian roots and the Japanese pianist and composer Takashi Kako, who studied at the Paris Conservatoire and was a student with Olivier Messiaen. The new performance of the legendary piece, a co-production with Theaterhaus Stuttgart, was shown towards the end of the ImPulsTanz Festival at the Vienna Volkstheater.
A grand piano sits stage right. Takashi Kako has pulled his grey hat down over his face, looking rakish, and then surprises with his tremendously delicate touch. Perfect melodious sound envelops the body, motionless, as if laid out.
What follows now is an awakening, a resurrection, even. At first, Ivo answers the music just with minimal, tentative movements, lifting an arm, letting his hands play – which beautifully corresponds to the fingers on the keyboard. Ivo is moving as if in trance, and then shows how consciousness awakens and this body becomes habitable. Then the dancer stands still in the light: for a moving instant, it seems as if he has looked in the face of nameless terror. Everyone is transfixed by his gaze.
Ismael Ivo exhibits the (nearly) naked body, while aiming at the spiritual. He displays the muscles of the soul. Sweat is running down his body, he breathes heavily, his chest is heaving. Life’s functions become visible, and the body is alienated into a grotesque display of anatomy. What shows here is Ivo’s affinity with pitch-black Butho, which could be called a dance of darkness. Takashi Kako is now dissecting the piano after his initial, subtle timbres, hammering away at the keyboard, maltreating the strings in a controlled rage. Ivo fast-forwards through emotions: circling in ecstasy, writhing with torment and torturing himself, touching on insanity and throwing himself into revolt – eventually attacking the pianist.
This performance is painfully beautiful, too beautiful, almost. Apocalypse wow! The perishing man shows dismaying scenes of rising and falling. And ends up weaving a story around death and transfiguration.
Above all, ’Apocalypse’ is the encounter between two virtuosos: an evening of conjuration and enchantment, between seduction and battle. In Vienna, homage was paid to the three stars with rapturous applause.
Sandra Luzina, Tagesspiegel August 15, 2006

With the intensity Ismael Ivo is no doubt still giving off, his performance brings to mind studio theatre shows by great, mature modern dancers.
Andrea Amort, Kurier August 11, 2006

SHAMANIC POWER
The ImPuls Festival audience is cheering exuberantly: Ivo and Kako have performed a masterpiece, dance of a different kind, far removed from ’cool’ contemporary dance, from experimental movement or technique for its own sake. Step by step, gesture by gesture, image by image three artists – Ivo, Kako and Amagatsu – develop a symbiosis, where concentrated sound, arresting choreography, aesthetics and lighting design (Junichi Matsuoka) merge into one.
Ismael Ivo, the fabulous Brazilian dancer, is of course the centre of attention. Ivo applies his strict choreography, which is demanding to the point of exhaustion, with the highest degree of perfection.
At every moment, he makes it his own piece that is only thinkable for the physique of a tall, powerful dancer.
As tribal king he proceeds to the ceremony, as shaman he conjures up secret powers, like a whirling dervish he conquers space. And as the medium of higher powers he sinks into a ritual of death.
Karlheinz Roschnitz, Kronenzeitung August 11, 2006

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