It cheered me up when I saw the press release announcing the Le Printemps de la danse arabe#1 – The Arab Spring of Dance #1.
Le Printemps means to be the first in an annual celebration featuring cutting edge contemporary dance and performance in the Arab Middle East and North Africa. This first year will feature traditional, contemporary and hip hop choreographers and performers from Egypt, Palestine, Morocco, Lebanon, Tunisia and the Comoros for three months of dance, new-style circus and other live performance in some of Paris’ most interesting venues.
The news cheered me up because I’m with Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher, Thomas Wolf and the sergeant of my former platoon. Everything does flow, you never step into the same river twice, you can’t go home again and we know we’re somewhere, a destination and a beginning, when we get there. Also, keep an eye on where you put your feet. Dance, the “art of movement”, speaks these ineffable truths. Le Printemps de la danse arabe#1 is a somewhere that we’ve finally got to.
The Charonne metro station, on the number 9 métro line, its history and my experience in and around it, make up a part of the cheery feeling.
A plaque in the station now reminds voyageurs that Charonne was the final destination for eight left-wing demonstrators. They were demanding justice for Algeria and Algerians and were killed, heads bashed in or suffocated, in a frightful 8 February 1962 police riot.
From Charonne station, Karine set out for and returned from the 1986 rue de Rennes record shop bombing by somebody demanding justice for somebody in Lebanon; from Charonne in 1995 I set out for and returned from an RER B in which somebody, maybe an Algerian agent provocateur, exploded a gas bottle filled with nails, maybe trying to get me to hate Algerian Islamists and support French intervention; coming up the stairs from the
Charonne station, I heard the news of the September 2001 massacres by some Saudi Arabians who felt obliged to deliver justice to America by spectacularly murdering people working in the World Trade Center. The drive-by mass murders of November 2015 began, apparently, just a block down the way from the Charonne station, at La Belle Equipe.
All this brings to mind how lucky I and mine are. Also, it brings to mind the Grande Mosquée de Paris, a place of memory also. A noble complex, with its origins in the annexation of Algeria to France in 1846 but only completed in 1926, the Mosquée was the first mosque I ever went into. When it was chic for the women in the neighborhood to go to the Mosquée’s hamman (sauna), Karine used to go there, too.
Picking Karine up at the Mosquée sometimes gave me an excuse for little walks through the Jardin des Plantes, which I liked a lot then and like a lot now.
Without giving myself any trouble whatsoever, by walking to the Mosquée, I eventually learned why a mosque, as well as food for the soul, serves tea and cakes and other food for the belly and will provide a bath, a rest and a book, too. My baby boy in my arms, I remember plummily suggesting to his grandfather that the honey cakes alone would justify the little fellow’s precocious conversion to Islam. Feu-mon beau père always walked bent forward, hands humbly clasped behind his back, as if he might need at any moment to bow to Charles De Gaulle. My quip made him straighten up a bit.
And there, in the memory of the Charonne station, too, along the floral alleys of the Jardin des Plantes, just beyond the Grande Mosquée’s hamman and the tea and the cakes, is the Institut du Monde Arabe, the main sponsor of the Le Printemps de la danse arabe#1.
A happy fusion of Arab and European design traditions, and only a short walk from the Mosquée, the Institut really is an example of an architectural bijou in a platinum-price setting. It has an elegance made of that rich and precise geometry that masquerades as austerity in the Arab world; the elegance shelters a formidable collection of art and books.
Why, I can’t say, but the Institut du Monde Arabe always makes me think, “Mmmm. Chestnut trees all in a row”.
So, Le Printemps de la danse arabe#1 brings the “art of movement” not just to the Institut’s repertory of elegancies but also, for me, a destination and a beginning to all that has happened at Charonne station on the number 9 line, brings sense to the memories that live there.
And along with personal sense, Le Printemps takes a new look by new, clever people at all the crazy themes you could imagine. Spectators will enjoy themes ranging from and to the why of war, luminosity and the human being, tuning in and dropping out, the Word and the terrorist, rhythm and moving, emergence, inner light, the weight of weight, movement and dance/dance and movement to Swan Lake, bodies politic, guys in cardboard, pelvic essentials and the body in Arab society.
With Le Printemps, we’ve arrived at somewhere and we’ve begun something.
Le Printemps de la danse arabe#1runs from Friday 22 March to Friday 28 June, with performances, workshops and films at Le Tarmac, Théâtre National de Chaillot, Centre national de la danse - C ND, Centquatre-Paris (104-Paris) and Atelier de Paris – CDCN.
Institut du monde arabe, presided by Jack Lang, originator of Paris’ Fête de la Musique, is the principal sponsor of Le Printemps de la danse arabe#1. Performances take place at the Institut du Monde Arabe, 104-Paris (CENT QUATRE-Paris), Le Tarmac, Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration, Atelier de Paris (as part of the annual June Events dance festival) and the Centre national de la danse, Pantin campus (as part of the the CN D’s annual Camping pre-long vacation program of workshops, conferences and shows).
Reservations for Le Printemps de la danse arabe can be made at the Institute du monde arabe or by telephone at 33-140 513 814 Tuesday through Sunday from 10-17h and at the door until 19h45 the day of performance or by internet.
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