Saburo Teshigawara closes the Atelier de Paris’ June Events 2019. Teshigawara’s rendition, with Rihoko Sato, of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot last year at the Palais de Chaillot left Karine wiggling excitedly in her seat and me with tears in my eyes.
Karine wiggled mostly, she tells me, because she agrees with Rihoko Sato that Teshigawara’s dance is unique and incomparable – a reflection of the choreographer’s insistence on the dancer’s coming to terms with his or her body in its particular environment before entering into the performance dancing. Karine loves straight-up balletic-style dance and the duo of Teshigawara and Sato did straight-up dance to perfection.
I got teary because Teshigawara showed me Prince Myshkin, the hero of The Idiot, as I had felt him when I was 15 years old. Teshigawara was able to make Karine wiggle like an excited six-year old and do me like he did is because, I think, his choreographic accent is on performance – sense, posture, gesture – more than dance – accent, roughly, on: body, rhythm, sensibility. It’s not just the uniqueness of Teshigawara’s particular style, it’s performance that carries The Idiot forward, not dance.
And, ‘though Karine is often right and currently hotly disputes this judgement on Teshigawara’s choreography, just as she disputes my judgement on Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s mind-blowing (Afternoon of a) Faun, as surely as Liberty is the Genius of the Bastille, performance is the Genius of hip-hop.
So, bluntly, I’m saying, without wanting to make a blunt declaration: hip-hop is as much a part of the secret of Teshigawara’s choreographic mastery as it is of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s. I’m saying much the same thing about hip-hop and dance today when I say performance pushes the programs for June Events at the Atelier de Paris - Carolyn Carlson or for Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales en Seine Saint Denis 2019, for Occupation#3 at Théâtre de la Bastille and … for the 10e Biennale internationale des arts de la marionnette – “Tenth International marionnette festival”.
What I’ve said to Karine’s hot counter-arguments is a rather dry “Open your eyes”. What I tell her further is that if she’s opening her eyes wide and not seeing it, she’s missing another proof of the breadth, depth and pervasiveness of the African-American contribution to world culture.
Hip-hop popularity and physical performance standards put new life into old, and modern, and contemporary, choreographic wines. The energy and freshness of Cherkaoui’s (Afternoon of a) Faun wouldn’t be possible without the emotional codings of movement hip-hop enables … Farid Berki’s troupe Melting Spot recently celebrated the choreographer’s 25 years in hip-hop by infusing a new and energizing formality into dance numbers ranging from chorus lines to musicals (all the while giving an enthusiastic and popular audience ranging from 7 or 8 to 80 or 90 a new way of understanding Haendel, Bach and Vivaldi) … then there’s hip-hop’s social universalism – its “accessibility”… Choreographer and dance
performer Jann Gallois, a favorite of mine, comes to mind – in fact, it was a conversation with Jann Gallois that really got me thinking seriously about hip-hop. For Gallois, despite a thorough grounding, repeated and victorious battles and little other formal training, hip-hop is just a port of entry to contemporary dance.
Whether, like Cherkaoui, renewing modern classics or, like Berki or Amala Dior (who opens June Events), doing “fusion” or, like Jann Gallois, doing contemporary dance or, like Teshigawara, making no particular claims at all, hip-hop is the choregraphic enabler.
Hip-hop takes in traditional and classical dance (and music) forms from any sublime corner of the earth and gives it a way to relate to whatever who, here and now it needs to relate to. … Hip-hop is the point of reference for all dance today – even “traditional” dance (viz., Varhung – Heart to Heart, in Avignon last year)… Hip-hop bears on contemporary and modern dance and dance performance and classical dance in the same way all these have borne on each other at one point or another over the past century and a half.
But hip-hop does a lot more than popularize, re-energize, enable and reference. Its popularity and energy are a reflection of a set of universal values. Just for an instance, take a look at how Amala Dianor (Parallele) or Oussmane Sy (Queen Blood) handles female dancers – their choreography uses the possibilities of the female body in their choreography, not the femininity of the performers. Now, take a look at any mixed group of break dancers … So, behind hip-hop is one form of radical equality – non-gendered differentiation to you, Bub. So, now let us now look closely at and for this hip-hop that put performance and values into dance today the world over.
