Far across the distance and spaces between us/The heart does go on…
- Céline Dion, "My Heart Will Go On" (Love theme from the “Titanic”)
His metro advertising says French top de top rapper MC Solaar is on a géopoetique tour.
Makes sense to me.
“’Geopoetics’, Ma’am”, I say, gripping Karine’s hand and turning to gaze into her eyes, “They don’t pay much, surely. But, then, Ma'am, I don’t always sleep sound. Do I?”.
One of the originators of the French rap-hip-hop scene and a poet of ideas as well as of songs, Solaar is a straight-line child of chanson française, a sort of unpainterly Ramalzee.
Géopoetics has been on my mind since before running into Solaar’s advertising, since I went to see Jann Gallois’ Reverse, at the Palais de Chaillot, Théâtre National de la Danse. Though I went to see Gallois’ work without thinking much of the rest, Reverse has been created part of the national theater’s “cultural dialogue” with Japan, associated with a program called “Japonismes”. In addition to co-sponsoring (with the Festival d’Automne) contemporary expressionist dance such as Saburo Teshigawara’s The Idiot (a gripping performance of Prince Myshkin’s sacred madness) or Takao Kawaguchi’s tribute to butoh originators Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, the theater also put together Triple Bill#1, in which Gallois’ piece featured.
The brainchild of Dominique Hervieu, currently director of the Bienniale de danse de Lyon and a tireless promoter of dance performance, Triple put Jann Gallois and Kader Attou to writing for Japanese hip hop dancers and, as a ballast, threw in mass media hit Tokyo Gegegay’s 100%-Japan hip-hop-inspired dance cabaret High School.
The idea was to see how French choreography would shape under Japanese interpretation or maybe how Japanese interpretation would shape under French choreography. Gallois, who discovered dance and learned her trade in hip hop, now writes broadly contemporary dance. Attou, who, like MC Solaar, came of age in the early 1990s, has developed a wide variety of performance and concept while keeping a strong association with the hip hop theme – “urban dance”. The five Japanese performers are hip-hop bred.
But because Triple put hip-hop at the center, this could not be a straightforward application of “other” (Japan) techniques on “other” (France) choreography, or vice versa. And that’s because hip hop is universal culture, the shape of universal citizenship.
Physically fun and intellectually deep, universally accessible and powered by values rooted in notions of human equality and individual self-reliance, hip hop is a universal ideology rather than a gadzillion dance trends. In hip hop, the cultural power of African-America has combined the radical politics of Thomas Jefferson and the radical humanism of Ralph Waldo Emerson to create the first true universal citizens living out a first truly global culture.
Intentionally or not, Triple Bill showed that, like any other profound human phenomenon, hip hop has a historical base. With every bell and whistle of better than a 100 years of American pop culture blaring, Gegegay’s High School closes Triple Bill shows how hip hop is the inheritor of all modern popular entertainment. Its operative words are “inclusive” and “diverse”. The empowered shade of Mae West’s erotic insolence hovers over the wildly explosive doings of a Pachinko cabaret in which a deranged sumo wrestler has breathlessly thrown a kitchen sink in somewhere: rambunctious-bottomed chorus girls dressed in open pleat slit-skirts and Manga-style soft-porn-style sailor suits dance on school desks in precisely delineated Las Vegas-style numbers that seamlessly patch in the ass-grinding, tit-thrusting entertainment-industry-style eroticism of MTV around a heart of the strenuous and punchy ground-to-air movement of battling interpretative- or expressionist- hip hop!
As an ideology hip hop empowers individuals working within strong groups. This is why a fairly straight-forward battle-style hip hop performance enables Kader Attou to use his Yoso (elements) piece to order the five traditional godai (material positions) expressed in the elements kū (空, Void); chi (地, Earth); sui (水, Water); ka (火, Fire) and fū (風, Wind). With composer Régis Baillet marrying contemporary electronic music to traditional Japanese instruments, Attou’s choreography just lets each of the five performers – shared with Jann Gallois’ Reverse – systematically take the measure of the others and affirm himself in his space. These individual actions build overall tension as performers stretch themselves to be so much within their individual spaces that the stretching produces a Big Bang of expansion of self and selves: mutual, mutualizing and mutualized space.
As a practice, hip hop values self-reliance and promotes individual accomplishment. That’s why Jann Gallois’ Reverse seemed so strongly about her development process as a choreographer and so little about technique or its announced theme of “our topsy-turvy world”. The piece leads off with performers’ heads down, limbs loose, feeling out a choreography from among classic break-dance moves. As the group of five dancers – shared with Kader Attou’s Yoso – at angles and somehow overlapping, brushed then bumped then touched, a bridging motif took shape and hardened into movement that enabled a cross-over into a choreography of acrobats dancing on the tips of fingers and spinning on their crowns, amazing Tokyo passersby not by their synchrony but by their synchronicity. In other words, hip hop let her do with Japanese dancers what it seems to me she wants to get to with all the performance I’ve seen from her thus far: to bring together, really together, compactly and perfectly together.
When all is said and done, then, because hip hop is what it has become, Triple Bill#1 was more a demonstration of how the locals from around 36°02'50.2"N 138°10'13.4"E and the locals from 47°4'60'' N 2°24'0'' E develop themselves within our universal culture.
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