The first word of the first poem of the first collection is basket

Reality,
what we perceive of it
we translate
into tanka. We shout it out
and something appears

By bringing the tanka to the stage, Ondine Cloez and Kotomi Nishiwaki poetically revisit twenty-four years of complicity, wielding a humor as absurd as it is subtle.

As suggested by the title of this playful duo, everything here revolves around poetry, and more specifically around the tanka. This short form of Japanese poetry is rigorously structured in 31 syllables (5-7-5-7-7) and seeks to reveal something previously invisible or unknown: an emotion, a sensation, a memory, a desire, a fantasy. Staged as a conversation, dressed and styled almost identically, Kotomi and Ondine / Ondine and Kotomi recount everything that happens to them while on stage. Past and present, misunderstandings, complicity, and confusion all intertwine. The two performers first met in 2000 while studying at P.A.R.T.S. Twenty-five years later, they reflect together on the distance between their bodies today and those of the past, wondering whether this story is still their own—or whether they have now become strangers to it.

With irony and delicacy, they explore opposites and symmetries, playing with emptiness as much as fullness, with what can be said and what cannot, with the spectacular and the real. Together, they compose a subtle poem celebrating complicity, the passage of time, and the time we share.

— Text by La Place de la Danse