Hiku

Retiring from the world to stay in one's room, and never leaving it again. Choreographer Éric Ming Cuong Castaing and performer and set designer Anne-Sophie Turion imagine a space for meeting with three hikikomoris, these people living reclusive in Japan, sometimes for years. In a delicate setup, movements and speech come to life, unprecedented links are woven between beings kept at a distance, who find themselves brought closer together. In a stage space open to circulation, several screens broadcast filmed sequences, revealing fragments of the lives of Shizuka Fujii, Mastuda Ippei and Tomohiro Yagi, the three hikikomori performers. Telepresence robots, piloted from their rooms in Japan, allow them to express themselves live, to move, and to interact by mastering their way of being present. Their remarks are translated live by Yuika Hokama, a human interface with this withdrawn universe. The project thus weaves a network of sensitive means to establish gentle contact with a closed world. The tangible presence of these usually invisible people creates a sensation of vertigo. This delicate encounter, like the paper partitions of traditional housing, addresses essential questions about existence and its fragility, in a violent society with ever-harder contours.