Living Together, Dancing Together

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui received the Kairos prize in 2009, one of the most prestigious European awards for culture. His work has not only captivated the critics: even audiences less familiar with the abstract grammar of modern dance appear enthusiastic. By Amin Farzanefar

Alongside Akram Khan, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui is one of the absolute top talents of modern dance. But the bilingual son of a Muslim Moroccan father and a Catholic Flemish mother, born in Antwerp, found his talent for dance via an unorthodox route – namely as a 15-year-old dancing in MTV clips (against his father's will, of course). At the age of 17 he was discovered as a background dancer for television – and it was all uphill from there. He once described himself thus: "I'm a man, a son, a choreographer, a Belgian, homosexual. I've got a tattoo, brown eyes, I'm the child of a guest worker; I'm Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui."

These words sum up what is in a way the "source material" for his dance excursions, which often link up the concrete data of his own biography with global issues. These are frequently communication problems and a search for meaning in a world that straddles the traditional and the post-modern, a world in which old cultural boundaries find new fluidity: sometimes the old clashes with the new, sometimes the boundaries appear surmountable, and then suddenly lose their validity.

A cultural amalgam

For his programme "Zon Mai" in 2007, Cherkaoui and the photographer and director Gilles Delmas created a huge house-shaped cube, the walls of which served as projection screens for video loops of the dancers in their own spatial zones – an associative analysis of the subjects of homeland, home and immigration. The piece "Myth" (2007) on the other hand compares the myths of various peoples – Cherkaoui sees at the heart of these old stories not our conventional moral categories of "right" or "wrong", but rather case reports about the consequences and results, causes and effects of certain attitudes and behaviours. In this way, "Myth" is an observation on the relativity of human evaluations and judgements that are often influenced by upbringing.

Cherkaoui's creative principle lies in the process of amalgamating new truths out of these myths and sagas from various nations and cultures. He rejects the sort of static cultural concept that he views as commonplace in Europe. He is constantly seeking out encounters with different dance cultures and art forms, and draws inspiration from cooperation with a variety of talented figures, for example with the British-Bengali wunderkind Akram Khan ("Zero Degrees", 2006) or the flamenco dancer María Pagés ("Dunas", 2009).

He devised the rapturously received piece "Sutra" in 2008 together with Shaolin monks after spending several months with them at their monastery. The result was a furious kung fu performance involving man-sized block-shaped wooden elements on the stage that were shifted, danced around and drummed upon in a meticulously synchronised choreography – sometimes they served as a ramp, wall or platform, and at other times they formed an ensemble of coffins, dominoes or boats. He frequently develops his remarkable stage sets with the designer Antony Gormley – anxious that the metamorphosis that he is striving for as regards content is also reflected in the production's formal aspects.

For example for "Babel", Cherkaoui's latest work, Gormley had five large cuboid scaffolds made out of aluminium rods. The structures repeatedly create new barriers and interactive surfaces – as a telephone box, an office, customs station, cage, as rotating and dancing cubes balanced on their corners – until they inevitably pile up skywards. Emanating from the myth of tower construction, Cherkaoui and his co-choreographer Damien Jalet broach the issue of borders and transitions in an increasingly globalised world, in which differences between language and culture appear to be at once insurmountable.

What the members of his ensemble dance, gabble and perform in pantomime style around these cubes are scenes of power, powerlessness and community: the battle for one's own territory – at the cost of others or with them – the juxtaposition of individualism, egotism and responsibility for the greater whole.

Misunderstanding as a principle

"Babel" is a figural round dance of exuberant, almost circus-like opulence: two Japanese people address each other in a rage – but no one is sure exactly why; a robot woman teeters coquettishly across the stage, and then mimics the gestures of an air stewardess; a merry pandemonium suddenly breaks out in the triumphal procession of a despotic Pharaoh held on the bodies of his subjects – or is it perhaps an African warlord, or a popstar?

"Babel" is shot through with communication breakdowns in speech, pantomime, the language of gestures and acrobatics. Performed with a good dose of humour, the multilingual game of 13 dancers (from 13 countries) fluctuates between creation and destruction, desperation and hope, isolation and interaction, chaos and the search for meaning. And again, this cacophony of languages is also embedded in Cherkaoui's personal experience in Antwerp: the French that his parents spoke at home, and that wasn't their mother tongue, and the Flemish officially spoken at school. For this interlacing of private togetherness, the everyday dramas with the big ideological questions, he finds clear, simple words:

"We ask: What does living together mean, what separates people from each other, how much space are we allowing each other? Am I letting you into my world or not? Am I allowing others to establish an empire, what is this empire doing to others?"

Cherkaoui is working on his next project, initiated in 2008 by the great Pina Bausch, together with the British-Bengali dancer Shantala Shivalingappa: "Play" is concerned with the games human beings play with each another – with seduction, concealment, masking, winning, prevailing and losing. Watch this space.

Amin Farzanefar

Translated from the German by Nina Coon

Editor: Lewis Gropp/Qantara.de

Qantara.de

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