Features PerformanceQ&A and Interviews Published 24 January 2014

The Poetry of Dance

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui on choreographic multilingualism and his current piece, Apocrifu.

William Drew

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui came to contemporary dance at the age of 19.  He’d been dancing before then but a combination of jazz, classical, hip hop, flamenco and African dance.  Even at that young age, he wanted to try everything.  Leaning dance forms from different cultures, he was already thinking of connections: “making combinations” as he described it.  Born in Antwerp to a Moroccan father and Flemish mother, he enrolled in Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s P.A.R.T.S. contemporary dance school.  What he discovered there was the potential of dance:

“I became aware that, through dance, I could connect my intellectual world with my physical world.  Until then, dance had been very instinctual, something I did for pleasure, something that made me happy and that aspect is very important, of course.  I discovered that there were other things you could talk about through dance though.  Everything became possible.  It was something I could commit myself to totally.”

I’m interested in the verb that Cherkaoui uses here: talking.  I suggest that it’s the default term that we fall back on whenever we refer to communication:

“Talking is really a means to be understood.  Some people communicate with a lot of elegance and grace. It’s the same whether you’re using language or using dance.  Dance can be a form of poetry as well.”

Cherkaoui refined his own form of poetry over the course of several years working as part of Alain Platel’s legendary Les Ballets C de la B.  He choreographed his own work as part of the company and Platel’s influence is evident in all the work he’s made since: most notably in the bringing together of performers from different cultures and disciplines.  Cherkaoui started his own company, Eastman in 2010 and he’s developed this practice further by placing dancers with entirely different choreographic languages on stage together.  In Sutra, for example, Cherkaoui himself (in the original production) performed alongside the monks of the Shaolin Temple.  Cast as the outsider, he had to try to find ways of communicating across a vast cultural chasm.

In Apocrifu, originally made in 2007 for La Monnaie in Brussels but coming to London for the first time in January, he is just one of three dancers from different choreographic traditions on stage attempting to find a common language.  Dimitri Jourde is a circus performer as well as a contemporary dancer; Yasuyuki Shuto is from the Ballet of Tokyo; Cherkaoui describes his own dance style as “liquid, always trying to transform”.  The search for a common language takes on different meanings within the piece.  The set is covered in books.  Its inspiration came from a piece that Cherkaoui made in the same year (a particularly prolific period even for him) called Myth, which has already appeared at Sadlers Wells where he is now an Associate Artist.

One of the characters in that piece was a librarian, living in the world of letters.  Cherkaoui decided to follow that character into his own world and this became the world of Holy Scripture.  In the context of the piece, this is taken to mean profane texts as well as sacred ones: anything people live their lives by.  In the piece’s development, Cherkaoui became particularly interested in apocryphal texts and discovered that some of the books that didn’t make it into the bible can be found in other sacred texts like the Qu’ran. “Whatever you choose not to keep ends up somewhere else” he explains.

Talking to Cherkaoui, it becomes apparent that his attitudes to cultural influence are reflected as much in his own physicality as a dancer as in his need to collaborate across cultures and disciplines:

“A lot of my work is about me deepening my own relationship to the world, usually connecting through another person or other people.  It doesn’t mean there’s no ego involved but that’s not the point of departure.  All of us, we have learnt our gestures, like our language, through imitation.  It’s only after this stage of imitation that we move on to interpretation.  I always want to learn new things though.  I don’t want to fix myself.”

I wonder if this searching for connections across cultures, this choreographic multilingualism, has its origins in his own background growing up bilingual (“Flemish, French and some Arabic”) and of mixed heritage.  While he acknowledges that may have played a role, he points out:

“But that’s true of all of us.  Look at your father’s family and your mother’s family.  I’m sure they are from very different cultures.  I’m sure they’re not the same.  Not when you get down to details.  Nothing is pure.  No culture is pure.  Everything is a mix. I see that whenever I come to London.  Culturally, it’s constantly transforming. Liquid, constantly transforming, whatever you choose to keep ends up somewhere else.

The way Cherkaoui moves on stage is the physical representation of his ideas of the permeability of culture.  The intellectual and the physical flow back and forth into one another like blood being pumped into different chambers of the same heart.  I’m reminded of an image from Myth where his dancers appear to actually be made of a kind of black liquid, to have transcending their solid form.  Liquid, constantly transforming but unforgettable in that moment.

Apocrifu is at the Queen Elizabeth Hall at the South Bank Centre on 24th and 25th January 2014. If you miss it or if you see it and are eager for more, Sadlers Wells will be presenting 4D, four diferent short pieces by Cherkaoui, on 23rd and 24 th June 2014.

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William Drew

William Drew is a writer, narrative designer and dramaturg based in Brighton. He makes work at the intersection between live performance and gaming as Venice as a Dolphin and a Coney Associate. He is Associate Dramaturg of New Perspectives in Nottingham. He spent several years working in the Royal Court Theatre’s International and Literary Departments and has been a script reader for the National Theatre, Hampstead and Traverse Theatres. You can find out more about his work here: http://www.williamdrew.work

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