Orbo Novo: choreographer Sidi Larbi Charkaoui at the NAC.
Choreographer Sidi Larbi Charkaoui has become the undisputed darling of the international dance circuit with his contemporary movements based on a highly dramatic and explosive forms of physical contortion that are extremely original. Of Moroccan and Flemish origin, he grew up in Belgium and studied with Anna Maria de Teersmaker all the while feeding off Hip hop, Modern jazz and a desire to express through dance the multicultural flow of human beings that is in the process of transforming Europe. He has danced with les Ballet contemporains de la Belgique and has gone on to work as a choreographer for the Saddler’s Wells Ballet; He has also choreographed for the Ballet de Monte Carlo, the Royal Danish Ballet. Among his many works he created a startling study of corporeal defiance with 15 Shaolin Monks that was performed at the Avignon Festival before a stunned audience. Later we saw it at the National Arts Centre in the 2008-09 Season.
One might call this “Dance Theatre” in the way that Pinna Bausch used the term Tanztheater. In this production, the dancers speak their intentions and explain the progress of the choreography before it really gets underway. The speaking voices alternate among all the participants and as they twirl their arms, twist their fingers, showing how the rhythm of their bodies follows the exciting rhythm of their narrative, the voices explain how the author of the founding idea, neurosurgeon Jill Bole Taylor, through her book My Stroke of Insight, observed the onslaught of a stroke. Using her words, they describes the symptoms that progressively take over her body. First the right hemisphere, then the left hemisphere, always adding her knowledge as a neurological specialist so that the fanciful movements in a fairly colloquial language, becomes a first hand account as this woman, apprehends the world from a mind that is slowly disconnected from her surroundings, leaving her in a state of Nirvana, a “ La –la land “ that leaves her completely euphoric
. During this first period of explanation many interesting and beautiful movements evolved on the stage. The speaking dancers communicated with us by words but also by a form of hyper sign language where fingers, arms, elbows, shoulders and whole arms came into play. At the very beginning, an ensemble of huge panels made from a mass of small squares, each one just big enough to allow a whole body to wriggle through. Together, these squares formed panels that could be pushed around, regrouped , separated or brought together like the walls of a prison, that engulfed or liberated the dancers as they moved throughout this labyrinth of connected squares.
As the dancer’s climbed over the panels, slid through the open squares, drew themselves along the bars and seemed to drift up and down defying gravity, they became creatures in a liquid world oozing through and over these porous structures. In fact the most interesting moments of the evening were the physical games that these muscular bodies played with these sliding panels that dissolved boundaries and defied the limits of gravity and time.
.
However, after that quasi scientific explanation of the idea of a stroke and how it might have transformed the insides of a human being, the corporeal expression seemed to falter.
It is true that we saw a host of twirling bodies like whirling dervishes as they spun round and round, apparently creating a flow that corresponded to the music, or even to blood. The fact that the dancers began speaking languages we did not understand brought us back to the actual stroke situation and the reaction of someone who loses the powers of speech .
The astounding virtuosity of each dancer became more obvious as well, as each one developed his or her own flailing gestures in a collective rhythm that the music imposed on the company. . What was less obvious was the relationship between the scientific explanation and the general movement of this ensemble. The choreography seemed to turn around within itself. What about those trembling bodies, the uncontrollable shaking, the collapsing creatures, the scratching and disconnecting of joints and bodies in this image of falling apart, of disintegrating, of losing control…which the dancers so adroitly represented. It was almost too simplistic in relation to the complex neurological explanation that we heard earlier in the show. But how can scientific reasoning be translated into corporeal movement? That was the challenge.
And precisely, there was a strange disconnect between the scientific explanation and this Buddhist corporeal vision of the world that appeared to emerge from the dancer’s bodies and break the spirit of the performance as soon as the explanations were over. The connection between a flow of love among all living creatures that was to have represented the new consciousness resulting from the situation of the stroke, seemed very vague. The choreography even appeared repetitive and at times self-absorbed, even though the climbing and floating through those panels, was so beautiful.. These magnificent dancers all look like body builders. They have hugely developed muscles, well-proportioned limbs and torsos with strong arms and solid frames. Their twists and turns and contortions leading to apparently floppy limps and collapsing spines are tightly controlled by well exercised muscles. It is astounding to watch what he has done with the dancers from the Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet in this new work Orbo Novo.
However, the general impression of the choreography as a whole is less satisfying and I felt that this production generated much less excitement than his work has done in the past.
I do hope we see the choreography of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui soon again on the NAC srtage because he is constituting an important body of work which, taken as a whole, is leaving its mark on contemporary dance as a whole.
Orbo Novo Orbo Novo The Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet At the National Arts Centre, Ottawa March 3-4 2011