When I was still constrained to see myself as just another bratty and ungrateful mouth to feed, left cheek sunk in left palm, I daydreamed a lot: of Alan Ginsberg’s radical demand for a paid up “I am”*, of boys like girls and girls like boys but-different-hey-ho, of revolution, of the national anthem on a djembe, of a Swan Lake in underpants. We brats used to snicker about underpants. It was a way of ripping off grampa’s whalebone collar, declaring Liberty Hall.
All devoutly-wished daydreams eventually come true. In a properly lived life, snickers eventually give way to a lightness of being. Marvelously true; deliciously light.
Radhouane El Meddeb’s Swan Lake is proof of it. His piece catches the diverseand various performers of the Ballet national du Rhin in a gorgeous state of undress, just beside their racked tutus. He sets them undone, by no means untutored, to perform the essential lightness of Swan Lake: a stirring choreography of sensibility against sentiment, there-and-then against here-and-now, seeming against be.El Meddeb’s take works wonderfully well with the public. Seated next to me was an athletic teenaged girl whose intelligent boldness had struck me, so I talked to her. She said she was at a circus performer school and pointed to her classmates seated all around. How did she like Swan Lake? It was the first ballet she’d ever seen – her eyes shone. It was wonderful, she said.
El Meddeb’s Swan Lake, inspired, the performance note says, by Nureyev’s1986 Paris Ballet version, played in March at the Palais de Chaillot, as part of the very creatively successful Printemps de la danse arabe#1 program.
Printemps performances that rival Swan Lake in vision and intelligence include, just to name three outstanding pieces among at least eight excellent ones, Kawa, Aïcha M’Barek and Hafiz Dhaou’s brilliant piece around coffee, “the original silence”; Soyons fous, by Cie Tché-za, an (ironic) appeal to the curative power of madness; and Portray and Walking, sweet pieces by Shaymaa Shoukry that reinvest ordinary body movement with soul.
Kawa is pure body poetry made of slow thrust, tinkles, rustles and half-light set to music… or is the music set to it?
Though conceived with a boldly political theme in mind, Soyons fou is fine and disciplined contemporary dance shaping hip hop’s fureur divin. The dance troupe’s name, “Tché-za”, means “Comorian Urban Dance”.
Upcoming events of Printemps de la danse arabe#1 will include work-in-progress by Danya Hammoud and Näss (Folks) by Fouad Boussouf presented at the Atelier de Paris as part of its June Events dance festival and work by the Sareyyet Ramallah dance school at the CND-Centre national de la danse, in the near-suburb of Pantin. Both works seem promising and both are certainly worth a trip to the interesting settings of the Cartoucherie and the campus of the Centre national de la danse. Portray and Walking, along with Fighting, a work in progress around aggression and relation, are seamless, naturally-occurring fusions of contemporary, classic and urban movement. Shoukry says that dance in Egypt is shaped out of all available means, local and individual and foreign and formal, from the streets to YouTube to P.A.R.T.S. It may this that explains the exceptional quality of her performance.
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