Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui

Dramaturgy and Engaged Spectatorship

Lise Uytterhoeven

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030278151
• eBook ISBN: 9783030278168
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

This book analyses the world-renowned Belgian choreographer's key approaches and dramaturgical strategies through selected case studies from his oeuvre between 2000 and 2010, from Rien de Rien to Babel(words). It investigates Cherkaoui's choreographic and dramaturgic interventions in debates on the nation, culture, religion and language, by emphasising the transcultural, transreligious and geopolitical dimensions of the dialogues and exchanges he explored during this initial decade. 

 

Engaged spectatorship refers to the ongoing thinking, talking, research and writing that the spectator is invited to do in order to fulfil the work's macro-dramaturgical potential to resist nationalism, populism and religious fundamentalism. The book meticulously explores Cherkaoui's rich, multi-layered theatrical imagery and aural landscapes to demonstrate the agile and ever-shifting interpretive acts the works elicit from their audiences. Offering a full-length analysis of Cherkaoui's work, the book is essential reading for students, researchers, practitioners and Cherkaoui fans.

© The Author(s) 2019

L. UytterhoevenSidi Larbi CherkaouiNew World Choreographieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27816-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction—Kaleidoscopic Identity and Aesthetics

Lise Uytterhoeven¹

(1)

London Studio Centre, London, UK

Lise Uytterhoeven

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Since his choreographic debut in 1999 for Les Ballets C. de la B., Flemish-Moroccan dance theatre choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui has become a prolific creator of new works in a variety of contexts, including Rien de Rien (2000), Foi (2003), zero degrees (co-choreographed with Akram Khan, 2005), Myth (2007), Apocrifu (2007), Sutra (2008) and Babel^(words) (co-choreographed with Damien Jalet, 2010). These works, made in the first decade of the new millennium, and the processes that yielded them, are characterised by cross-cultural collaboration and onstage complexity. In this book, I will articulate and analyse the challenges presented for spectators in these staged works and argue that the labour in which spectators are invited to engage is dramaturgical in nature.

Before introducing Cherkaoui through the perhaps conventional biographical approach, a more exciting starting point rooted in choreographic analysis is La Zon-Mai (2007), a three-dimensional multimedia art installation for museums and gallery spaces in the shape of a house, co-created by choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and film-maker Gilles Delmas. From the inside of the house, moving images are projected on its white walls and roof, snippets of film capturing 21 dancers moving in their homes across Paris, London, Berlin, Vienna, Wellington, Tokyo and Buenos Aires. These dancers are among Cherkaoui’s closest friends, who have given shape to his choreographic productions thus far. This work, not conceived for the stage but equally intent on storytelling through choreography, honours some of Cherkaoui’s closest collaborators in the 2000–2010 period. If nothing else, it is through an understanding of his unstoppable collaborative and transcultural drive, a drive to connect with others across cultures, that his choreographic project crystallises in the observer’s mind.

Intersections Between Home, Place and Identity in La Zon-Mai

A spectator writes: ‘One dancer hops along her kitchen worktop, curled up like a foetus. Another spins dizzyingly on a living room rug. Yet another performs a remarkable bathroom ballet between the toilet and the washbasin’ (Stevens). Another reviewer recalls: ‘Akram Khan […] dances in his narrow foyer, spinning tightly within its confines. Shantala Shivalingappa’s arms can’t cut through the glass doors to her balcony. A contortionist in green gym shorts tears up his living room floor. A dancer with long black hair combed over her face slices through the veil with her hands’ (Jackson). The films are projected in a loop on a house-shaped building without doors and windows, without ever physically allowing the viewer to step through its threshold. Walking around the installation in the museum or gallery space, the spectator encounters these intimate films of dancers in their homes accompanied by a moving soundtrack of medieval and traditional songs, arranged by Vladimir Ivanoff (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1

La Zon-Mai, multimedia installation created by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Gilles Delmas (Photo by Gilles Delmas)

La Zon-Mai was commissioned by the Cité National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration in Paris, as part of a project aiming to change the perception of, and prejudices towards, immigration (Cherkaoui & Delmas). The Cité is housed in the former Musée des Colonies et de la France Extérieure. The irony of this remarkable metamorphosis of the building’s purpose does not escape Cherkaoui.

A place dedicated to colonialism has been dug up to allow the nation to pay homage to the phenomenon of immigration! […] I found this fascinating, troubling and at the same also typically French: the ability to overturn these roles and to confront the present with the past. (Cherkaoui & Delmas 9)

La Zon-Mai was conceived to be placed at the centre of the Festival Hall of the Palais de la Porte Dorée, a room adorned with colonial frescoes depicting the radiation of French culture across the world. These frescoes are based on the ethnocentric, colonial paradigm, in which Europe proclaimed itself the centre of the world and regarded the cultures it encountered as Other, ‘à l’extérieur’. In contrast, in Cherkaoui’s philosophy ‘one is never at the centre and always exists in reference to something else’ (2007 Interview). Thus, he is interested in ‘a process of learning to think, to travel whilst decentring oneself, without considering oneself as the pivot’ (Cherkaoui & Delmas 10). In response to the overturning of the building’s concept and purpose, La Zon-Mai is shaped as an inside-out house. What goes on behind closed doors is readily visible here, projected onto the exterior walls, the private made public. The dance films echo the frescoes on the walls of the room; these animated frescoes are described by Cherkaoui as ‘an intimate cartography’ and ‘a precious family album’, as these dancers form part of what he calls ‘his personal story/history [in French “histoire”]’ (Cherkaoui & Delmas 23).

This inversion of inside and outside is mirrored in the work’s title by the reversal of the syllables of the French word for ‘house’ or ‘home’ (‘maison’/‘zon-mai’). Inverting syllables is characteristic of Verlan, a French language game and secret language turned slang. In response to Cherkaoui’s dramaturgical interest in language as symptomatic for larger cultural issues, the methodologies used in my research on Cherkaoui’s work draw heavily on theories of language, particularly translation studies and theorisations of storytelling. In the case of La Zon-Mai, too, sociological perspectives on language immediately shine an interesting light on the title of this installation. From second-generation North-African immigrants in the Parisian banlieue who describe themselves as ‘les beurs’ (Verlan for ‘les arabes’), Verlan has been appropriated into ‘le parler d’jeunes’, youth speak in general and has become a common occurrence in hip hop music. Verlan has, for a considerable time indeed, been ‘penetrating the rigid boundaries of Standard Modern French’ (Lefkowitz 2). The use of the sociolect Verlan could be read as an act of undermining the hegemonic qualities of the French language, the language of colonisation. The Verlan word ‘zon-mai’ is an attack on the concept of ‘home’ itself, which for the second-generation immigrants in Paris has gone topsy-turvy. Cherkaoui was born and grew up in Antwerp, Belgium, as the son of a Moroccan father and a Flemish mother. Being both second generation and culturally ‘mixed’, his sense of belonging and identity has never been unambiguous or straightforward. By Verlanising the word for house/home, Cherkaoui and Delmas do more than merely aligning themselves with marginalised youth subcultures. Verlanisation shows that languages themselves, and by extension cultures at large, are dynamic and ever-changing, never static or fixed.

More recent research on Verlan has paid attention to deeper ethnographic understandings of its role in the construction of identity . Verlan is framed as ‘a social practice through which youths can position themselves in relation to their peers and to the dominant discourse in a variety of ways’ (Doran 101). Ginette Vincendeau, a film scholar specialising in popular French cinema, understands Verlan to be a marker of identity, of otherness, both dangerous/illicit and playful. Its use stresses a sense of cohesion against the outside world (Vincendeau 26), while a term such as ‘beur’ simultaneously erases difference. This ethnographic research highlights that Verlan is used ‘to construct and participate in an alternative social sphere, in which hybrid identities – ones that did not correspond to the mono[-lingual or monocultural] norms of the hegemonic imagined community – could find expression and validation’ (Doran 104). The sociolinguist Meredith Doran concludes that its use situates identity in local, second-generation communities, rather than in any particular nation. Doran continues to write that ‘In terms of language, this sense of multi-ness was signalled in part by the incorporation of borrowings from family and other minority languages […]. The heteroglossia of youths’ local code serves as a means of indexing their ties to (and solidarity with) a variety of languages and cultures, allowing them to express their own sense of cultural and linguistic hybridity, tied both to France as a literal home, and to other cultures within and outside it’ (Doran 111). In Chapter 5 of this book, I focus on the heteroglossia in Cherkaoui’s work, in which multiple languages are spoken on stage without translation. With the aid of translation studies, this dramaturgy of non-translation is read as postcolonial critique. It is interesting to highlight this continuous heteroglossia even within the sociolect of Verlan itself, avoiding any notion of singularity and fixity.

A populariser of Verlan in mainstream music is the Belgian singer Stromae (Verlan for ‘maestro’), who has won international success with his electro-hip hop sound and shares with Cherkaoui a strong historical and postcolonial awareness. Cherkaoui and Stromae were both named in a 2014 list of ‘25 most influential allochthonous Belgians’, along with the then Belgian Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo and footballer Vincent Kompany. This problematic term, the obverse of ‘autochthonous’, is commonly used in Flanders to refer to non-indigenous people and is indicative of the failings of multiculturalism in Belgium and the associated rise of the populist radical right in Flanders. In recent years, the word has been problematised by some mainstream newspapers, calling for its use to be discontinued. Controversially, to mark the 50th anniversary of the arrangements made by Belgium...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction—Kaleidoscopic Identity and Aesthetics
• 2. Rien de Rien—Dramaturgy Inviting an Engaged Spectatorship
• 3. Transculturality and Its Limits in Zero Degrees and Sutra
• 4. Thematic Explorations of Religion in Foi and Apocrifu
• 5. Heteroglossia and Non-translation in Myth
• 6. Dreamwork, Circumambulation and Engaged Spectatorship in Myth
• 7. Geopolitical Re-framing of the Nation and Language in Babel(words)
• 8. Final Reflections
• Back Matter