Interview with the Alien

Written in black pen on the DVD is ‘Interview with the Alien’ and in blue ‘for Ramsay’. A gift from Peter Whitehead who died in June, and who had donated his archive to De Montfort University. On it is a film that documents a ballet performance. At the beginning, after the film’s name, is the subtitle ‘The hieroglyphic language of dance’ and at the end ‘The Petrograd State Ballet 1923’.

Whitehead was a writer and film maker probably best known for documenting the counterculture in London and New York in the 1960s and for pioneering promotional film clips for television for pop groups like the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd.

Whitehead’s 1969 film The Fall contains documentary footage he filmed inside a student occupation at Columbia University and of its brutal suppression by the police.

When shown in a Greek film festival in 1973, it inspired student occupations in Athens that ultimately forced the military junta to cede power, leading to the restoration of democracy in Greece. I had heard about Whitehead from colleagues who are working on the archive, and knew that recently he has been writing novels. But, until I received the DVD from him, I had no idea he had also been involved in dance.

When I watched the video I didn’t know what to make of it and drew a blank when I showed it to friends who know more about ballet than I do. I had evidently been set a puzzle. I said this to Whitehead when I met him for the first and only time at the official launch of his archive, and asked for a clue. Have you ever heard of Guido Carmelich? he asked. I had but couldn’t immediately remember in what context.

A search reveals that Carmelich is one of the choreographers whose work is presented in the Slovenian director Janez Janša’s 2007 work Fake It! which included unauthorised versions of famous works by Pina Bausch, Trisha Brown, William Forsythe, Tatsumi Hijikata, and Steve Paxton.

When the piece went on tour internationally, the company wanted to add a work by a Slovenian choreographer and decided to revive Carmelich’s 1960 solo Monument for an Unknown Dancer.

The programme for Fake It! explains that Carmelich had been an intern with Béjart in Brussels in 1960 when the latter was making his much acclaimed version of Le Sacre du Printemps. Béjart and Carmelich, it explains, ‘shared a common view that dance should be less formalistic and based on developing moving potentials of each individual’. Béjart named his dance group Ballet du XXeme Siècle. ‘Carmelich argued that the name should be Ballet du XXIeme Siècle because, to him, the C20th represented the defeat of the humanist ideal and he didn’t want to associate his art with historical experiences of exploitation, wars and catastrophes’. The two went their separate ways.

Whitehead told me that he met in Carmelich in New York when he was filming The Fall, and invited him to make a cameo appearance in it. Carmelich is shown dancing in a subway car with the iconic 1960s model Penelope Tree.

In the early 1970s Carmelich was commissioned to make a new work for the ballet company at the National Theatre of Belgrade. The theme that the commissioning committee gave him was a materialist view of historical development based on a famous debate in St Petersburg in 1923 between Anatoly Lunacharsky, People’s Commissar for Education and Culture – the Politburo member who invited Isadora Duncan to start a school in Moscow – and the writer Maxim Gorky, exemplar of the socialist realist novel.

Marx had argued that, in any historical period, social relations are determined by the relations of production:

It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production […] Then begins an era of social revolution. (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859)

Gorky and Lunacharsky, having just attended a performance by the Petrograd State Ballet, debated its relevance for the revolution.

Gorky argued that ballet was not capable of supporting the historical destiny of the proletariat in revolutionary class struggle. Lunacharsky, however, argued for the cultural importance of ballet as an art form and proposed that the ballet of the future would convey ideas not yet conceivable in words.

Carmelich told Whitehead about his commission when they met by chance in the Egyptian galleries in the Louvre, both sharing a fascination with Egyptian art. Together they came up with an interpretation of what Lunacharsky meant when he said that dance was hieroglyphic. Like dance, a hieroglyph is and is not a language. It inscribes sufficient information that is at times an extension of language, at times in opposition to it, but the one always in relation to the other even if in a contradictory way.

They then developed a story line for the ballet about a visitor from another planet – The Alien – who could understand, through reading the hieroglyphics of dance, the relation between the modes of production and the material productive forces of society. The Alien had only been allowed to see this, however, on condition that she didn’t interfere in the historical process however much she wanted to accelerate society to the point where social revolution and cultural renewal could occur.

Carmelich and Whitehead wanted the extra-terrestrial beings in the ballet to be modelled on figures in Egyptian mythology, in particular the trinity of Osiris, Isis, and Horus. The Alien, they decided, should be costumed as the Falcon-headed god Horus. There were even discussions about whether the artist Penny Slinger, Whitehead’s former partner, could design these costumes. Slinger and Whitehead both shared a fascination with falconry and Egyoptology. This idea, however, proved to be unacceptable to the committee in Belgrade, so instead the extra-terrestrials in the ballet wear C18th century periwigs, while different stages of historical development are represented by different costumes – the white faced, clown-like group, the Coryphées in black tunics and grey tights, and the group of soloists in bright coloured leotards or jeans. The pas de deux between the male extra-terrestrial – wearing a frilly, pale blue eighteenth-century frock coat and periwig, and the Alien – in white tights and periwig –reprises Carmelich’s duet with Penelope Tree in The Fall.

For some reason, the committee in Belgrade wanted the piece to be set to music by Mozart, but here Carmelich, having given way over Horus, insisted on using a recording of piano music that Whitehead had composed, based on his music for Daddy, his 1973 film made in collaboration with the artist Niki de Saint Phalle.

Interview with the Alien, which premiered in Belgrade in 1975, was an immediate success and won a special commendation when shown at Bitef, Belgrade’s International Theatre Festival later the same year, (the Grand Prix that year going to Tadeusz Kantor’s The Dead Class).

In the closing moments of the ballet, The Alien’s solo evokes Horus’s flight across the sky. Horus was considered to contain the sun and moon. The sun was his right eye and the moon his left, and they traversed the sky when Horus, as a falcon, flew across it. Carmelich told the commissioning committee that this final choreographed sequence represented the entirety of the historical process condensed into a single day, so that the Alien’s final kiss to the audience represents the dawning of the new morning of the revolution.

This solo with its delicately poised, strutting steps and staccato shifts of the neck and head, make The Alien strangely bird-like. Whitehead explains that the falcon’s piercing gaze, rather than representing a Marxist understanding of history, signified for the two of them a burning desire for the social, cultural, and spiritual renewal that they both longed for.

Matthias Sperling, Now That We Know. 2nd November 2018, Lilian Baylis Studio, Sadlers Wells Theatre

Now That We Know is a 45 minute solo during which Matthias Sperling dances while giving a prolonged talk about his understanding of the relation between mind and body. During this he refers to recent developments in cognitive and neuroscience.

Because it starts in darkness, and because it is a long time before the lights are very gradually brought up, at first all we can hear is his voice. Is he moving already? It is a while before we begin to pick out a vague, whitish blur where his hands are gesturing. A couple of minutes later his whole figure is just beginning to be hazily distinguishable in the now twilit performance space. Finally we can see that he’s dressed in black, has a long straight black wig, dark glasses, and men’s flamenco shoes with square, block heels.

His monologue about what we now know about the neurophysiology of embodied existence is not delivered in a normal, everyday voice or that of someone giving a lecture. It is extremely exaggerated, deliberately over-emphatic, and modulated over an unusually wide range of almost musical tones. This has been given a reverberating echo effect through the sound system.

During the first few pitch black minutes, he speaks extremely slowly. In the dark, this echoing voice combined with the slow pulse in Joel Cahen’s sound design, has the kind of eerie power I associate with a séance or a popular mesmerism act, perhaps like one of those in Hilary Mantel’s novel Beyond Black.

In a Q&A, however, Matthias insisted that he wasn’t adopting a persona but being himself. Slowing his voice right down at the beginning, he says, is part of a process of centering and becoming increasingly sensitive to the bio-feedback of moving and performing. Nearly all of what he says during the piece is in line with the kinds of things people can sometimes say during an image-based, ‘somatic’ movement class. There are however a few little bits of what he calls science fiction such as the repeated invocation to ‘extend your hypnotic organs’.

I’ve now seen Now That We Know a few times. As an audience member, I have found the effect of witnessing the piece quite mesmerising, and I have to admit to tuning out and then back in once or twice. As I’ve indicated, it develops very slowly, almost imperceptibly, although there are changes from one distinctive sonic pulse to another, and different ranges of movements and postures for different parts of the piece.

[Matthias Sperling, Now That We Know. Photo: Foteini Christofilopoulou.]

Sometimes he kneels on the floor with his legs folded beneath in an unusual way, or he lies spreads out on his side propped up on an elbow. At other times he stands with his weight shifted seemingly right off balance with an added precariousness because of the block heels.

[Matthias Sperling, Now That We Know. Photo: Foteini Christofilopoulou.]

There is always an evolving relation between the line between his two feet, the one through his hips, and the one stretching between his hands. His hands themselves move smoothly through fascinating sequences of crisp gestures. Sometimes these are like those of saints in passion on a Baroque Spanish altarpiece, sometimes like angels in joy in an Italian early renaissance fresco. They evoke gestures that seem to bear the weight of histories and cultural memories.

This highly considered and exquisitely executed verbal and movement score is what makes Now That We Know more than just a performative illustration of simplified scientific ideas presented in an “accessible” and “artistic” way. It creates a space for an altered state of consciousness that might perhaps be useful for research into cognitive and neuro-scientific exploration.

As an audience member who retains a small residue of the knowledge of science I acquired at school many years ago, Now That We Know makes me think. And of course it encourages me to do so with my whole being and not just with the soft grey matter between my ears and behind my eyes.

Trailer for Now That We Know.

[Declaration of interests: Matthias Sperling is undertaking doctoral research at De Montfort University with a bursary from the Midlands Three Cities Doctoral Training Partnership, and I am one of his supervisors. Also I received a press ticket from Sadlers Wells Theatre.]

Samira Elagoz’s ‘Cock, Cock .. Who’s There?’ Summerhall, Edinburgh 18th August 2018

I probably wouldn’t have gone to see Samira Elagoz’s Cock, Cock .. Who’s There? because its sexual subject matter is the kind of thing that generally makes me uncomfortable. But an old friend whose suggestions are always excellent recommended it to me very strongly. What impressed me most about the show was the insights it gave me, as a man, into the way that Elagoz, and I guess a lot of other women as well, see men.

It is a brave, powerful autobiographical piece which starts with her telling the audience about being raped by a close friend four years ago. It is not however a misery memoire because she goes on to tell us about, and show us parts of the creative video projects she subsequently devised around intimate meetings with strange men. Aware of the way in which men respond to her sexually, Elagoz started watching them watching her. First we are presented with her friends and family’s reactions to her rape. Then she goes on to show a series of filmed events in which meets men – using a video chat room, Craig’s List, and Tinder – who agree to her recording their reactions to her, some of which have been presented on their own previously as films and in exhibitions.

Elagoz explains that when she tells people that she’s been raped, they often react very strongly so that she ends up having to deal with their emotions although she was the one who had been hurt. Cock, Cock .. is very cleverly structured to deal with this. She herself narrates her story with all its difficult details in a steady, even way, sitting on a plastic chair and introducing stills and videos from her projects. I winced when we saw one of her friends who, as I understood it, more or less implied that he thought that what had happened to her was because of the way she behaved. Did he say this spontaneously or did she ask him to say it? because obviously society so often reacts by blaming the woman and not the man.

I really didn’t like the look of most of the men she met with, particularly the older ones who talk about taking the dominant role in BDSM sessions. Emotional intensities appear on the screen. When she is raped a second time, while on an artist’s residency in Tokyo, she videos her immediate reactions to it, the rapist’s name bleeped out. It is only towards the end of the show that she finally breaks and cries while being hugged by her mother.

As I’ve already confessed, I found myself feeling fairly uncomfortable looking at most of the men she met. This is not just male, socially conditioned, homophobic panic at witnessing another man’s sexual behaviour. It is also to do with my own history with feminism.

When I was a student in Leeds 1972-6, all the women I knew started going to women’s consciousness-raising groups. Then in 1975 Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, started his savage attacks on women. When West Yorkshire Police started telling women not to go out alone in the evenings, feminist graffiti began appearing saying there should be a curfew on men rather than women, and one frequently heard phrases like ‘all men are rapists’ and ‘pornography is rape’. I know people my age who still think this.

That’s the personal baggage I brought to Elagoz’s Cock, Cock .. but I don’t think that is where the piece is coming from. Elagoz says she didn’t want to cut herself off from men and recognised that she was still interested in them. It would surely be a mistake, however, to conclude that Elagoz has used the process of making these films and performances to ‘get over’ what has happened to her.

There is a lot going on in the piece beyond the autobiographical level. Cock, Cock .. is a compelling investigation of the way the internet is impacting on contemporary sexual behaviour and the kinds of emotional intelligence required to navigate this. It uses video and performance to bring up, and make us in the audience think about, a lot of issues that some of us at least might find difficult to talk or even read about. It is a reclamation of female sexuality: at the end of the show we are shown a suggestive, deliberately staged series of selfies in which Elagoz, with think lipstick and lots of makeup, looks straight at the camera and allows a thin stream of viscous white fluid to dribble out of her mouth – definitely not the gesture of someone who thinks pornography is rape. And while so many students (including mine) learn about ‘the male gaze’, here is a strong demonstration of the female gaze in action. I’m eternally grateful that my friend told me I must see it.

Brocade. Roberta Jean, Edinburgh Fringe 17-8-2018

I saw Roberta Jean’s Brocade during Nottdance in Nottingham in March 2017 and found it so interesting that I decided to see it again here in Edinburgh as part of Dancebase’s Fringe programme. It had made such a strong impression that I’m sure I could have described it if asked, and yet when I saw it again last night there was lots of it I didn’t remember at all. Obviously pieces change and develop but when I looked at a couple of videos on Roberta Jean’s vimeo channel https://vimeo.com/user2493240 I found the very bits I’d forgotten and initially thought might be new. So maybe this is the sad reality of gradually forgetting? Or perhaps it is just that some dense, subtle pieces need more than one viewing?

What I did remember: the dancers’ footfalls rhythmically skipping down the channel of performance space with the audience seated in two long rows across from one another. The long slow unison initial repetition of a simple skipping on the spot, establishing a pace, rhythms and energy. Then beginning to travel one way down the channel at the same pace, with again lots of repetition. Gradually complicating itself, different rhythms, different spatial paths, slow, or quiet, or fast and headlong,, sometimes in the channels behind the audience as well as the central strip, and so on. In an interview on the Sadlers’ Wells blog, Roberta Jean explains: ‘Brocade is choreographed as a loom of movement weaving by and around an audience. As an audience member, there is something joyous about experiencing these fleeting moments on a continual loop that stretches down a catwalk. You can feel us move the air around you’. http://blog.sadlerswells.com/roberta-jean-on-movement-mindfulness-and-musical-collaborations/ The image of weaving really captures what the dancers are doing, creating a dense texture of varying rhythmic, spatial patterns.

Spaces: The most obvious difference between Nottingham and Edinburgh was the venue though each was in a very atmospheric non-theatrical location. In Nottingham it was in an abandoned industrial space in the building in which Dance4 is based. In Edinburgh it was in the domed Council Chambers of Edinburgh City Chambers, an C18th Adam building on the High Street that was expensively embellished by the City Council in the late nineteenth century with lots of ornate Victorian mahogany panelling. In Nottingham and I think elsewhere, the dancers had an old worn noisy metal floor installed for most of the runway, and the spaces around us had a dusty, gritty patina. The runway was longer in Nottingham than in Edinburgh. The Council Chamber has a tight old sprung wooden floor which was suitably noisy and a carpet at one end so that when the dancers passed onto it their footfalls became muffled. The room was not blacked out. There was a wonderful view across the roofs of Waverly Station to the Scott Monument and Princes Street. For most of the piece, the lighting just came from the windows and the room’s light fittings, and only towards the end, when it was darker outside, were the room lights replaced by theatrical lights, instantly changing the atmosphere of the piece.

[The domed ceiling of the Council Chamber]

What I had forgotten: I’d only remembered the running, skipping journeys along the runway. I’d forgotten solos where dancers made subtle, elongated shapes with their arms that twisted them around in complicated ways that threatened to put them out of balance as the choreography turned them to face different parts of the room. Intriguing combinations of shoulder and elbow joints momentarily described shapes that almost made me think they had more joints than ordinary people. Angharad Davies’s atmospheric violin solo, I really should have remembered. One moment that struck me was when the precision of the dancers’ rhythmic footfalls in combination with some energetic violin playing reminded me of beautiful footwork in a Scottish reel (maybe because I was in Scotland?).

What I’m taking away this time: the individuality of each of the dancers but the strong feeling of a cohesive group and the perfect unison of their rhythmic footfalls; the solos; the musicality of the rhythm patterns; and the headlong energy of the women noisily careering along the runway in the warm mahogany glow of the domed council chamber at dusk.

Roberta Jean’s website: https://www.robertajean.org/

Akram Khan’s ‘Xenos’ and the traumatic past.

Here are some thoughts about Akram Khan’s Xenos which I have just seen at Sadlers Wells Theatre on a visit to London.

Before going to the theatre I went round the Rodin and the Greeks exhibition at the British Museum. This included some full-size studies for one of the figures in his great sculptural group The Burghers of Calais alongside the final work. The burghers are giving up their freedom in return for the safety of the people in their town, each showing their fears in different ways. Some of their gestures and the emotional atmosphere theses generate resonated strongly with AK’s dancing in Xenos. His intercultural fusion of Kathak and Western contemporary dance is one that merges the poetics of Sufi singing with the expressive tradition which Rodin’s sculpture exemplifies.

[Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais]

The starting point for Xenos is the presence of Indian sepoys in the European battlefields of the First World War. Walter Benjamin, in his essay ‘On the Concept of History’, writes about blasting ‘a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history, blasting a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the lifework’; when this is done, he suggests, one can recognise ‘a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past’. Xenos blasts marginalised memories of the contributions that Indians made during that war out of that period into our present consciousness. It uses music and dancing, and a small amount of text, to present a philosophical, poetic meditation on death and the meaning of existence.

[Akram Khan in Xenos. photo Jean Louis Fernandez.]

On the tube afterwards back to where I was staying, the man opposite me was reading the Evening Standard whose sensational headline story was about a deadly incident in the Belgian town of Liège where two police officers had been killed, their murderer had taken a hostage and then been shot dead by police special forces. With Xenos still in my mind I found myself thinking about the trauma of being caught up in a situation like that, how paralysing fear can be, how it must leave no space for anything except how to survive. But wasn’t that also the kind of situation that faced the Indian sepoys on the western front that AK had been exploring in his solo. Xenos did more than just blast marginalised figures and experiences out of the oppressed past. It opened up spaces, 100 years later, for feelings about mortality for which no space had existed in the midst of the traumatic experiences of the battlefield.

Germaine Acogny’s ‘Somewhere at the Beginning’

Germaine Acogny’s 2016 solo Somewhere at the Beginning (À un endroit du début) which she created with Mikaël Serre, was the highlight of this year’s Let’s Dance International Frontiers festival in Leicester. It is an extraordinarily powerful piece in which Acogny looks back at the events of her life, her combative relationship with her father Togoun Servais Acogny, and her feeling of connection with her grandmother Aloopho who died two years before Germaine was born. Aloopho is the name of the famous open air dance studio with clean raked sand and a modernist canvas awning at the school École des Sables in Senegal that Germaine founded with her husband Helmut Vogt. Dancers come to the school from across Africa and around the world to take classes in Acogny technique and contemporary African dance. Germaine is widely known as ‘la mère de la danse contemporaine Africaine’.

[photo by Thomas Dorn]

Somewhere at the Beginning explains why Aloopho is so important to Germaine, while at the same time giving audiences a personal view of Germaine’s experience of the history of colonisation and decolonisation. It is also a strongly feminist work and reflects on the relationship of francophone West Africa with Europe today. Indeed it is a piece commissioned by a group of French theatres and institutions and in many ways is made for black and white European audiences.

Most of the previews and reviews of this solo that I have found on the internet mention how old Germaine is, as if it is remarkable that someone her age is still making and performing such challenging new works. My response to this is that she is exactly the right age to dance this piece. I’m sure there are younger dancers who would love to be able to perform in this resonantly powerful and deeply emotional way, but they would just not have either the experience or the maturity to dance it convincingly.

The central dynamic of Somewhere at the Beginning is Germaine’s accusations against her father Togoun. She was born in Dahomey (now Benin) in 1944. Her mother died when she was six and her father, who must have been clever, was picked out to train to be part of the French colonial administration. He and Germaine moved to Senegal when he enrolled at the École Primaire Supérieure William Ponty in Sébikotane. At this time, there were close links between all the French colonies in West Africa so that students at Ponty came from several different francophone countries to receive an elite education. As a French West African governor at the time pronounced, the aim of Ponty was to ‘take its inspiration from the purest French traditions while plunging its roots in native life’. Art historian Joshua Cohen points out that its role was to cultivate ‘a group of school teachers and administrators who could function effectively as mediators between colonials and their majority population’.

[Germaine and Togoun – screenshot]

Togoun became a colonial administrator. The solo begins with Germaine reading from his autobiography while a photograph of him wearing an impressive militaristic uniform and peaked cap is projected behind her. He also wrote a popular children’s book Les Récits d’Aloopho, parts of which are also read out during the performance. Germaine’s chief complaints against Togoun are that he converted to Catholicism, renouncing the African spiritual beliefs of his mother Aloopho, and that he never gave her Aloopho’s two sacred copper knives. Aloopho was a West African Voodoo priestess. Execution of her sacred duties would have involved singing, storytelling and dancing, a kind of African total theatre. When Germaine was born on the Christian festival of Pentecost, she tells us, a dove settled on the windowsill of her room every morning for a month. The women looking after her and her mother took this as a sign that she was the reincarnation of her grandmother Aloopho. Several times during the piece she tells her father forcefully ‘je suis la mère de ton mari’ (I am your wife’s mother).

[la mère de ton mari – screenshot]

The solo narrates Germaine’s task, as a modern African woman, of realising a decolonised African identity through repudiating everything her father stood for, and reconnecting in a modern way with the African knowledge and experience of his wife’s mother and with the African natural environment as a whole in which this knowledge is grounded. In the performance this environment is represented by a recurring projection of shimmering images of Baobab trees.

[Aloopho’s knives: photo by Thomas Dorn]

If the journey from Aloopho to Togoun is the story of cultural colonisation through the internalisation of European, Christian values, then the journey from Togoun to Germaine is one of decolonisation through reconnecting with West African culture and beliefs in a modern, secular way. Germaine’s choreography, like the dance technique that so many dancers have now learnt from her, is one that is aligned to the idea of negritude. Léopold Senghor, poet and first president of Senegal and in the 1970s Germaine’s patron, was one of the founders of the negritude movement which is a largely francophone phenomenon. It posits a common African aesthetic underlying the artistic production of African peoples in the region if not across the continent and African diaspora as a whole. The notion of the nation state with demarcated borders is, after all, a legacy of colonialism. As such, negritude responds to a modern need for decolonised sensibilities. However it is by no means an aspiration to return to a simpler wholesome uncontaminated pre-colonial state of grace, but a modern, abstracted and secularised revitalisation of what are again recognised as valued cultural forms and traditions.

While Somewhere at the Beginning draws on these forms and traditions, it does so while using them in an unmistakably contemporary context. There are videos by Sébastien Dupouey of provincial Senegalese scenes in the present day. A man, driving a van down a dusty country lane reveals his somewhat patriarchal attitudes towards women and marriage. At an all women social event there is dancing and laughter. We listen to one of Les Contes d’Aloopho in which Tiviglititi, a court functionary who keeps repeating an inconvenient prophesy about the King’s death, is placed alive in a sealed coffin and set to float down the river. At the same time we are shown a video of a small, overcrowded fishing boat in rough seas carrying African refugees across the Mediterranean that seems in constant danger of sinking. Another shimmering handheld video that seems to refer to Aloopho’s fairy tales shows Germaine in a distinctively West African headdress walking towards the fairy tale castle in Disneyland Paris. Contemporary experience, Germaine is telling us, is one of fragmentation and disjuncture, whether from an African or European point of view.

 

Mikaël Serre explains that he and Germaine decided to introduce parts of the ancient Greek tragedy of Medea into Somewhere at the Beginning. This produces two moments of extreme emotional intensity. Whereas the Greek Medea takes her revenge on her husband for taking a second wife by killing her own children, this African Medea begins by auctioning them. Who will give me a Euro for this baby? she repeatedly asks in French, gesturing to us in the audience. Because we in Leicester up until now have been following the spoken French text on the sur-titled translation above the stage, this was at last a moment when we could look directly at Germaine while she was talking, and understand exactly what she was doing. There was some laughter at her engaging performance … and yet. She had just been talking about Gorée, a little island off the peninsula that is now the capital, Dakar, but which was settled by Europeans and was from the C15th to the C19th a port for the embarkation of slaves. It only occurred to me afterwards that this Medea was holding a slave auction.

[photo by Thomas Dorn]

Later in another emotional climax, Germaine flings a feather cushion forcefully and repeatedly to the floor saying it is her children until it bursts spectacularly in a cloud of white feathers. All the while she shouts accusatorily at her father. The video projections and Fabrice Bouillon’s sound score prolong and intensify this painful moment building to a climax and then finally ebbing away. Sometimes screaming can be a necessary, symptomatic expression of the violent legacy of colonialism and slavery.

[screenshot]

Following this a strange, masked, bird-like figure appears. It is like something from a picture by the surrealist artist Max Ernst, or from an African masquerade. Germaine sloughs off this costume and begins slow, repetitive ritualistic movements that still maintain the former intensity, marking out anti-clockwise circuits of the stage as she stoically moves on beyond her anger and pain. Finally a resolution through movement is offered to the intense performative experience that Germaine offers through her solo. It is one that asks us in the audience to face up to the disjointed nature of contemporary life expressed through the exemplary energy of a dancer strong enough to confront it with a lifetime’s knowledge and experience.

 

 

On École Primaire Supérieure William Ponty, see Joshua Cohen (2012) Stages in transition: Les Ballets Africans and independence 1959 to 1960. Journal of Black Studies 43(1) pp. 11–48.

Rhythm machines old and new.

I recently watched a short made-for-television film of Boy Blue Entertainment dancing Emancipation of Expressionism. I’d seen Boy Blue last summer perform Blak Whyte Gray at the Edinburgh Festival. I thought the company was impressive but, maybe because I was sitting too far back in the theatre, I didn’t find the choreography particularly exciting. Emancipation of Expressionism, in the short film that Danny Boyle has made for the BBC, seemed to be more ambitious in terms of its choreography.

[Danny Boyle’s film of Boy Blue’s Emancipation of Expressionism]

Dancers form blocks, moving in unison, out of which each dancer seems to emerge for a brief solo moment before sinking back into unison again. Often two very different blocks share the stage dancing moves with contrasting qualities. Sometimes a tight group performs clear, low key gestural material while another explodes across the stage beside them acrobatically. At one moment one side of the stage, lit in blue, contains a tight knot of angry dancers rhythmically punching the air while on the other side, in white light, dancers progress in a line out of the wings with softer more lyrical movements. It is like a symphony of movement.

[screen capture from Emancipation of Expressionism]

Watching it I found myself thinking about the way Boy Blue use hip hop movement and comparing it with my memories of break dancing in the 1980s. Somewhere in my room an old VHS tape of Charlie Ahearn’s 1983 film Wild Style is gathering dust, but it was easier just to look on youtube where I found I very useful extract from it.

[extract from Charlie Ahearn’s 1983 film Wild Style]

For the Rock Steady Crew who appear in it, break dance is a solo form, whereas Boy Blue, in comparison, are an ensemble whose unison execution of their hybrid vocabulary of street dance moves is immaculate.

Boy Blue have developed a vocabulary drawn from a wide range of styles – breaking, popping and locking and related robotic moves, waves, bits of crumping, waacking. No vogueing however as their choreography is formal and abstract, tells no stories, throws no shade. The Rock Steady Crew are all individuals each with their specialities, pulling out sensational new moves they’ve just been perfecting at home. At one moment in Wild Style, two dancers crouch in the same crab-like pose mirroring each other briefly before bouncing up lightly to go on dancing, jamming with one another, not competitively, but egging each other on to do more tricks.

[screen capture from Wild Style]

There is a rough, excitingly unpredictable, improvised quality to their dancing that makes them exciting to watch. The dancers in Boy Blue are individuals as well but dance together as a close-knit group. They are superbly rehearsed and almost effortlessly synchronised; but what is exciting about their work comes from the choreography, the lighting, and crucially, of course, from the interdependence of their dance and the music.

I was going to say that just as Boy Blue follows on in the movement tradition that the Rock Steady Crew did so much to establish, there are also continuities between Grand Master Flash’s scratching and mixing and Michael ‘Mikey J’ Asante’s music. Kodwo Eshun, however, rejects the idea of continuities, genealogies and inheritance in black music, arguing instead that a ‘fluidarity’ is ‘maintained and exacerbated by sound machines’.

[Grand Master Flash: screen capture from Wild Style]

[Grand Master Flash scratching: screen capture from Wild Style]

Dancers, musicians, and the music they scratch, mix, and sample all combine together to make a rhythm machine. Eshun says scratching isn’t just an effect or a rhythmic accompaniment to the music but part of a process of rhythmic layering. The Rock Steady Crew and Boy Blue aren’t just dancing to the music. Their aim is not a musical visualisation or a subtle interpretation that makes us hear the music differently (although that does of course happen). Being part of a community that is dedicated to this black cultural form requires total solidarity with the musical rhythm. The dancers are the rhythm, totally committed to hearing it and faithfully receptive to it, sensitively responsive to its subtle shifts and changes. This commitment to the rhythm machine is what unites the artists in the extract from Wild Style with Boy Blue.

What the machine does is to recombine found material – different styles of dance move, different musical tracks, and different aesthetic sensibilities. I’d like to call it a fusion, although I know this is a much contested term within the street dance community. The music for Emancipation of Expressionism includes ‘Til enda’ by the Icelandic musician Olafur Arnalds which itself combines, or is a fusion of, techno rhythms with the plaintive melodic sensibility of Nordic music (to me it sounds a bit like Arvo Pärt or a folk lament with techno rhythms). ‘Til enda’ gives a melancholy colouring to the choreography, which allows the dancers to express a strong sense of yearning.

[screen capture from Emancipation of Expressionism]

The title Emancipation of Expressionism suggests this yearning. But it also hints at an emancipation of street dance, an assertion that when lit, costumed, and well rehearsed it has a right to the same serious consideration as other forms of contemporary dance. And of course emancipation, like jubilee, has particular resonances for people whose ancestors suffered slavery. They are dancing a yearning for a joyful, brilliant future at one with the eloquence of the rhythm machine.

 

quotes from Kodwo Eshun (1999) More Brilliant Than The Sun. London: Quartet Books

details of original broadcast http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09qjl7l

New Contemporary Arab Dance Performance, DanceBase, Edinburgh Fringe, 19th August

This was a mixed bill with pieces from four choreographers: Farah Saleh, who is Palestinian but has recently moved to Edinburgh, who has collaborated with Salma Ataya from Ramallah; Yassin Mrabtifi, who is living in Brussels; and Samir Mkirech from France. I’ve already written about the end of the programme – where the audience were all made to fill out landing cards – in a previous post about a talk at Summerhall on The Geopolitics of the Arab Dancing Body. All of the artists in this programme seem to be working in experimental ways to explore ideas that – in one way or another – are in response to questions about identity politics or the political.

Salma Ataya and Farah Saleh’s La Même is about Arab women wearing headscarves, burkas etc. I’ve known Saleh for a couple of years and, to be honest, when she came on at the beginning of the piece with Ataya I hardly recognised her. This was because while Ataya wore a singlet and had her hair down, Saleh was wearing a top that covered her arms and a headscarf that completely covered her hair and folded round under her chin. Look at any medieval or renaissance painting and that’s how all European women seemed to dress at the time; but now it is associated in western minds with what a former prime minister David Cameron called being ‘traditionally submissive’.

[photo: Ataya and Saleh]

The dance material that Saleh and Ataya performed consisted of a series of quirky gestures smoothly assembled into neat, flowing sequences that included a lot of rolling on the floor, and wiggling limbs and other body parts in unexpected ways. They are certainly not in the least what one might expect from an Arab contemporary dancer – but, as soon as I write this, the question ‘why not?’ arises, and that in a way is part of the dancers’ point.

In the middle of this first section, they sat side by said and Ataya asked Saleh ‘why did you buy it for me?’ – the ‘it’ unspecified but obviously a headscarf. The answer came ‘you’re not young any more and all your friends already have one’. Then Saleh, completely straight faced blew a raspberry, and then another and went on blowing them. Ataya joined in clicking with her tongue in counterpoint. I realise this was mouth percussion, and it became the music for the next playful, intriguing series of movements. Ataya wrote ‘myself’ in English on paper fixed on the back wall and then, I presume, the same in Arabic script while Saleh danced a surprisingly balletic sequence along a diagonal across the stage to a well known tenor aria from Carmen.

Gradually, as the piece progressed, the two women put on more and more layers of cover, each time repeating the entire sequence of movements exactly the same with the same dialogue, mouth percussion, and aria. But somehow the movement looked different. I noticed different things in the dancing with different costumes. When, towards the end, they both wore full burkas with only a slit for their eyes, I saw the pirouette turns differently because their full length black tops, veils, and skirts were all flying out centrifugally. The material of their costumes flowed so beautifully that I thought it must be silk.

La Même in French means the same. They are the same people under all these veils and covers as they were at the beginning, dancing the same movements, less hampered than one might imagine by their increasingly voluminous costumes. Ataya and Saleh’s piece, which I guess has been made with both Palestinian and European audiences in mind, is drawing attention to something that is designed to hide the female body. Through dancing, she opens a light-hearted, safe space for further reflection.

Yassin Mrabtifi’s piece is called From Molenbeek with Love. Molenbeek is an Arab district of Brussels, just across the canal from the town centre. It was recently in the news as the place in which some of the terrorists responsible for the Bataclan massacre in Paris had lived. A few months after this attack, I went to a dance performance in a venue at the top of a huge warehouse in Molenbeek and wandered home through the area on my own quite late at night; and, to be honest, it all seemed very familiar, far from the hostile hotbed of radicalism that the tabloid press made out. For me it was just like being in parts of Bradford or Leeds where I lived for some years.

[photo: Yassin Mrabtifi]

Mrabtifi’s piece is slow and meditative. For much of the time he does things with a long silk ribbon on a short round handle – I don’t know the right name for this prop, but it is something I associate with Chinese dance spectacles. Mrabtifi meditatively rolls the stick around, winding the ribbon onto it in different ways. I began to think he wasn’t even actually going to fling the ribbon into the air and make the ususal spiralling shapes with it. In the end he did but with surprising, almost melancholy intensity – not at all the pretty spectacle I associate with this prop. This piece is a work in progress. It had an interesting atmosphere and challenged some of my preconceptions and expectations in a good way, and Mrabtifi is a strong, interesting performer. It might be that I missed something crucial, but ultimately it wasn’t quite clear to me where it was going.

Samir Mrikech’s Not Found had a great opening. Mrikech marched boldly into the studio wearing shoes, a white shirt, and an impressive, tailored suit jacket above track suit trousers. He stopped and stood proudly and confidently, his smiling face gazing not quite at us but somehow above and beyond our heads. A very familiar photograph of Emmanuel Macron from one of his election rallies was then projected, filling the wall behind him and an involuntary chuckle rippled through the audience, in recognition that despite Mrikech’s tracksuit trousers, a matching sense of entitlement being projected both on stage and screen.

The popular classic, Ravel’s Bolero came over the sound system as another photograph of Macron took the place of the first one, then, after another pause, more. Hollande, Sarkosy, then gradually back through a list of past presidents to De Gaulle. Then Cameron, May, Merkel, Trump, heads of state from Africa, Asia and around the world.

Mrikech’s movements, like the Bolero, started in a quiet, minimalist way. There was an occasional slight shift in the torso or shoulder, or a click of one heel. Each change, however, was sharply defined, like a body popping contraction. The music goes on repeating the same short theme in an almost imperceptibly gradual build up to the rich sonority of full orchestral, and the movement became bigger and more powerful. I didn’t notice when his shoes came off but he removed his jacket with a flourish, and when a little later he took off his shirt he was by then more like a male stripper than a head of state. Both of course have big enough egos to put themselves out there in public – think of Putin bare-chested photo ops. Since it was Louis XIV who used his own ballet skill as political tool, it was good to see a French dancer of, I guess, North African heritage, using choreography in such an engaging way to deconstruct the gestures of political power.

Dan Daw ‘On One Condition’ Zoo Southside, Edinburgh Fringe, 20 August 2017.

I went to see Dan Daw’s On One Condition because I remembered his solo video dance last year as part of Matteo Fargion and Jonathan Burrows’ 52 Portrait Series. Watching him at Zoo Southside, I started to think about writing a review and immediately realised that, because he’s a performer with disabilities, it would have to be supportive but that, unless I was sincere, what I would write would be patronising. On One Condition is a very honest, sincere show, co-created by choreographer/director Graham Adey in collaboration with Daw

Daw seems to have difficulties with motor control and has slurred, slightly halting speech, made a little more strange for me until I realised he has a slight South African accent. He tells lots of stories from his childhood and from his career as a professional performer, all, I think, carefully assembled so as to gradually inform us spectators and engage us in the very special quality he projects as a dancer.

There’s always something singular about the few performing artists I’ve seen who have a disability. This is I guess often because of the experience they’ve gained from learning to deal with peoples’ reaction to them and how they’ve turned this knowledge to good use on stage.

It didn’t take long before I (and – I don’t want to speak for others – but I guess everyone else in the audience) realised that beyond the physical difficulties was an extremely sharp intellect. There’s a great moment when after doing a minimalist sequence – stepping back and forwards for what seemed just a little too long – Daw announced: ‘This is a contemporary dance movement’, with a knowing sense of irony.

When Daw comes on at the start he’s wearing just white underpants (revealing his fine collection of hipster tattoos) and gradually gets dressed. His involuntarily jerky movements make this a long, difficult process. Difficult to watch as well, hard not to tense up and hold my breath, willing him to succeed. Soon after, he says he realises that as an unconscious child he had a homoerotic attraction to David Bowie, and later talks about how he felt the first time a man he was in a relationship with told him that he loved him and that he was beautiful.

Daw is very good looking. He has a kind of vulnerability that perhaps comes from not being completely able to hide his emotions. (Being in touch with one’s feelings is, of course, surely an advantage in the arts.) I suspect that, for those who know him, this makes Daw a beautiful person. But as someone watching him perform, the way he moves can also be beautiful, although it is hard to get to recognise this. It is hard not to see the effort he is making and the shakiness of his limbs, slightly held, blocked, and, as I mentioned earlier, not willing them to be more ‘normal’.

There was one section near the end of the show when Daw crawled in a slow, intense way, gradually rising to standing. At the end he unrolls his spine slowly to bring his head up, bit by bit, not rushing it but sensing each transition deeply. It is the kind of movement sequence I’ve found myself doing in the past during improv sessions, and the kind of deep focus I’ve tried to attain. I suddenly saw what he was doing as movement improvisation that reveals the singularity and individuality of his way of moving. I’ve not seen anyone move quite like that – and that’s one of the main things I look for in any dance performance. So by the end of the show I’d learnt a lot about the day-to-day and professional experiences of a dancer with disabilities; but I’d also seen something that surprised me in its beauty and individuality.

‘The Geopolitics of the Arab Dancing Body’, Talk at Summerhall, Edinburgh 19th August.

This was one of the ‘Talks and Pitch Sessions’ organised as part of the Arab Arts Focus at the Edinburgh Fringe. On the panel were the Palestinian artist Farah Saleh who is currently based in Edinburgh, Younes Atbane from Morocco and Shaymaa Shoukry from Egypt. It was chaired by Natasja van’t Westende a programmer from the Netherlands who directs Dancing on the Edge which facilitates artistic exchange with the Middle East and North Africa.

It was held at Summerhall where a lot of the Arab Arts Focus events have been taking place. To set the context, it is useful to describe the ending of the programme New Contemporary Arab Dance Performance at DanceBase earlier that afternoon.

Farah Saleh, Salma Ataya, Samir Mkirech and Yassin Mrabtifi – who we’d just seen performing their individual pieces – returned to the stage and handed all the audience a ‘Landing Card for UK/non UK subjects’. Questions asked included ‘hour and second of birth; color of your first bed sheet; hair length now; full name of your first, fourth, ninth and last love; Are you wearing a boxer/underpants Yes No. They were very officious with us and then they asked those of us with hair less than 15 cm to hand in our ID cards/passports, together with other quite demeaning tasks. I never carry any official ID, never felt I needed to. Uncomfortable to have the tables turned on and treated in as arbitrary and officious a way as some of the artists in events at the Fringe that are part of the Arab Arts Focus.

According to the Guardian, one of the performers who was booked to appear in Edinburgh, was told that the Home Office was “not satisfied on the balance of probabilities, that you will leave the UK at the end of your visit … I am not convinced you are genuinely seeking entry to the UK for a purpose that is permitted by the visitor rules and that you will not undertake any prohibited activity.”

There are obviously some dangerous people who the security forces need to be on the look out for, but there are also people like artists who we should immediately recognise, without having to think about it, should be free to come and perform in the UK. We have so much to gain from by allowing them to participate in an event like the Edinburgh Fringe, and international experience is useful for everyone, but particularly for artists, not least when it affords opportunities for events like this talk.

[Shaymaa Shoukry]

Here are some of the issues that were raised. On visa restrictions, Shaymaa Shoukry from Cairo said so many of her dancers had been refused entry that she had had to devise and adapt her work, abandoning the piece that had been programmed. She said she felt that what had happened in the UK mirrored the current oppression of dancers in Egypt. There, in the last few years, Independent dancers had to apply to the police for a permit to perform. If I understood her correctly this was actually a permit to dance in a nightclub. If you didn’t apply for a permit the police might ignore it but might not and you could be taken to court. And now the British Home Office was being equally oppressive.

[Farah Saleh]

All the dancers talked about the problem of being seen as Arab artists as a category invented by European institutions. Farah Saleh said she didn’t want to get gigs so some programmer could tick a box but because of interest in what she was doing as an artist. Younes Atbane said that the fact that identitarian questions were coming up now on stage was at least a step towards dealing with them. These issues are more difficult for dancers from the Arab world than visual artists because they concern the body.

Shaymaa Shoukry said her work was not concerned with these identitarian or political issues. It was abstract and explored the expressive sensibilities. She is also interested in dance and new media, and VR. She talked about the differences between working with European-trained and Egyptian-trained dancers. The former might have a stronger technique but Egyptian dancers had a particular sensibility to time which (I think) she implied was something she was interested in.

[Younes Atbane]

Gender issues of course came up. Saleh said her parents were revolutionary communists and had no problem with her becoming a performer. Shoukry recalled that while she was young, her family thought her dancing was cute, but some of them subsequently had difficulties accepting that she wanted to perform in public. Younes Atbane commented that, as a man in the Arab world, it had been more difficult for him to start dancing than for his female friends. But later he faced no particular problem when he started to perform in public, whereas that was in comparison extremely difficult for his female peers.

I got the impression that part of what what was important about this event was that it was an opportunity for these dance artists to define the issues that were important to them – including how to deal with support from European countries – and do so in their own terms rather than having to deal with the priorities of European institutions.