ImPulsTanz zeigt Myth am 24., 26. und 27. Juli im Rahmen seines Festivals!

Fixing a date with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui is an extraordinary exercise. His diary is packed full but neatly organised. The problem is not so much finding a gap, but finding one in Belgium. His tour schedule takes him all over the world. He is creating performances in several places at the same time. This mobility is literally and figuratively in his bones. He flourishes in these various environments and while there looks out for things he does not yet know. He then familiarises
himself with them and works them into yet another new creation. He is thereby slowly but surely building up a highly individual body of work.

We talk about his working method, the people who accompany him in his life, and about his Moroccan-Flemish background. It turns out that once he has been started off he is hard to stop. His thoughts on his work are very well articulated, and words come just as easily to him as dance. Talking, singing or dancing, it’s all the same.

Guy Cassiers invitation to form one of the artistic cells at the Toneelhuis enables him to work once again with several fellow travellers such as the dancers Damien Jalet and Darryll Woods and the singer and music expert Christine Leboutte. He has developed a clear working method with them over the last few years.

Sidi Larbi: ‘In many cases everything starts from a number of questions in a Pina Bausch-style process, where the dancers respond by means of the material they suggest to me. This material is all put together and interwoven, and before you know it you have a script that writes itself. Not a script that you create, but one you follow and discover as you move on. It is very important for people to realise that I never start out from a script written beforehand, but that the script gradually reveals itself.’

‘In Foi, the piece I made in 2003, we started with ‘what do you consider holy?’, ‘what do you find blasphemous?’ You figure out with each other how a movement can be created on the basis of an emotion you feel about this, and, vice versa, how a movement can evoke an emotion. At a certain moment we were working on manipulations where two dancers manipulated a third. Someone suggested that in this way we were perhaps archangels making a real person move. And from then on that became the situation; so it was an intuitive choice
that determined the rest of the performance.’

‘In every working process, intuitive, emotional choices are made, and then what you are doing is actually trying to extract sense out of nonsense. The nonsensical things in life, or the things you can’t express, you try to make sense of in your work. You look for something rational, a sort of pattern, in all these irrational proposals, a system that sees to it you suddenly have a performance. A performance that is a sort of emotional rollercoaster from beginning to end.’

Myth

When we interview him Sidi Larbi is already well into his work on his new creation for June 2007, Myth. In this case too everything started with a question: what was a fundamental moment in your life?

Sidi Larbi: ‘A moment when you felt you had lost your innocence. I try to draw inspiration from the way people deal with such situations. You have to look for ways of using them as something positive or constructive. Everything that happens to someone and everything he has from his parents together forms the source of why someone does what he does. The beauty of who a person is has to do with everything he experiences. That’s why I look for all these things. It is a sort of search for the source.’

Sidi Larbi briefly compares this sort of traumatic moment with a physical wound.
‘People often think that when the wound has healed, the body returns to its former state. But that is not true. The wound closes up again, but with new construction material. The wound becomes a scar. It is like a butterfly; it becomes a new form. The same thing applies to a trauma: one undergoes an essential change. If I continue on this theme, I want to know what it means to the dancers. And for myself too, I want to reflect on certain things I think I will never get over. I wonder whether this is because I focus on what has gone instead of looking at what
has appeared in its place.’

In his view, the Italian Patricia Bovi occupies a very important position in this creative process. This singer is a co-founder of Micrologus, an ensemble specialising in early music from Italy and Spain. She has worked with Giovanna Marini, an ethnomusicologist from Italy. Sidi Larbi is absolutely fascinated by everything concerning oral musical tradition and when working on Tempus fugit in 2004 immersed himself in polyphonic Corsican music, a discovery he was shortly afterwards to carry with him to In Memoriam, a project with Les Ballets de Monte Carlo.

Sidi Larbi: ‘Patricia Bovi has been keeping track of my work. I myself have always considered her singing a point of reference. She turned out to be intrigued by the sibyl, the oracle. She explained that if someone has this sort of gift it is often the consequence of a trauma. The trauma is a trigger, removing the obstacles to the special talent, such as seeing the future or being in tune with particular spirits. The fact that she would like to work on a new creation is for me a dream come true.’

The conversation will return more than once to the importance of music and singing in his work as a choreographer. We take a little time to consider the preparations for Myth. He already has a whole rush of ideas for movements.

Sidi Larbi: ‘In Foi I worked on the theme of angels and people. Now I am looking at the reverse side: not devils, but shadows. I am interested by the notion of light and shadow. The way I can manipulate shadows with dancers, so that the shadow ‘does something back’ to reality. Normally it is the object that creates the shadow, not the other way round. But it is precisely this reverse thinking that interests me. I want to see whether I can work back to front: what would happen if the shadow drove me forwards, instead of me creating it? What if that were the
reality? If our reality were actually the mirror-image of the shadow, which in its turn is the real ‘I’? It is an interesting way of thinking, because you change your perspective. You no longer approach reality on the basis of the limits of what you consider to be reality, but actually take up an unconventional position. You view things at a different level. You turn the picture over. The sense of shadow led me to ‘gothic’ people, and to the source of them – Gothic – as well as
to the links between Gothic and depression and melancholy, then ending up at ‘trauma’ again.’

The self-evidence of multiplicity

The rapidity of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s associative thinking is fascinating and undoubtedly the source of his talent too. Sitting casually on a chair, he acts out how he wants to work with shadows using fine movements of his hands:

‘I am looking for a link between the shadow and all the feelings and mythical figures accompanying it. For instance, there is a duet in the new work, where Damien is a sort of Dracula. This sort of mythological figure lives in our collective consciousness. They appeal to me because they are outside religion but can nevertheless be linked to it. It is for instance always a cross that can neutralise Dracula’s powers. In this way certain forms of myth touch upon and cross each other’s paths. The same thing applies to music. I use Catholic-inspired music, for example, but many of the characters are mythological figures from before
Catholicism existed and who were taken up again by Catholicism. For a great many people Catholicism is not even monotheistic. There is a saint for every sort of question you might have, as in some eastern religions. What you get then is a sort of Catholic faith where you believe in archangels and mythical figures all at the same time, in a vision that has little to do with the idea of there being just one god.’

Multiplicity, simultaneity, the idea that several views can exist alongside one another, to Sidi Larbi this is all absolutely self-evident. His world is a long way from the one where something has to be either one thing or another. Where the one is better or more right than the other.

Sidi Larbi: ‘What fascinates me is the point where these things touch upon each other, for example where a werewolf figure appears in Islam. What interests me then is how it can all go together, how they can cohabit. That was what I did in Foi, where I started out from elements in Greek mythology. Then Oedipus became Christ, but was actually Buddha. I often think in terms of archetypes that fuse into what the actor or dancer actually is. Preferably he is all of them. That’s why I am extremely interested in Eastern forms of theatre, precisely because the actor embodies more than one character, both the good and the bad, the man and the woman and so on. The actor there is everything and everyone. Or because people can constantly change perspective.’

His knowledge of Eastern theatre forms is not only theoretical. Whenever he can, he seeks out ‘masters’ with whom he attends workshops. Recently, for example, he took part in a Kabuki workshop in Paris:

‘Where a fan is first the arrow that wounds and then the wound made by the arrow, etc. In more ‘exotic’ traditional Eastern theatre it is the fact that an actor can embody everything that is precisely so interesting. It fills you with a sort of completeness that a Hollywood actor can only achieve by acting in twenty different films. Once you start to understand the codes of these Eastern theatre forms, they start to move you at a level you never expected to find appealing. When you learn to watch you see things for their own worth, and then it is no longer exotic, but very logical and emotionally-charged.’

This brings us to more sensitive territory. Does he, as a Flemish Moroccan or Moroccan Fleming, have a greater affinity with non-Western theatre forms?

Sidi Larbi: ‘Yes, but in fact it is as a reaction or provocation. Sometimes we view the art of the East in the wrong way. We find it attractive, but do not really understand it. If you do not know the codes, you cannot really understand it. If we have the pretence of being scholars of art, we have to study these codes to learn what they mean, what each movement expresses. It is a vocabulary we do not comprehend. Therefore we cannot form any judgement about it. We have to regain this awareness collectively, the awareness that we cannot really appreciate it because we do not understand it. That is the whole cultural question. It is about immigration but as far as I am concerned it is about everything. Because it is about trying to understand things.’

In this respect, he feels that he too has on several occasions been misunderstood:
‘For me, Foi was a very Western way of looking at the world and Tempus Fugit was more a question of thinking in terms of my Arabic side. I felt that this was not always appreciated by the people who knew my Flemish side. The elements that appear in Foi, the dissection of the subject of ‘faith’, the overlapping of religions, the way of handling suffering on stage, also reappear in Tempus Fugit, but in a completely different way, with aesthetics that make it more digestible for people in the Arabic world. If one had seen Tempus Fugit there, this would have been perfectly acceptable and people would have been able to interpret it much better than here. There is one scene with Hebrew-Arabic dialogue, for example. But to a Westerner these two languages sound very much like each other, so the point of the scene was lost by many Flemish people. As far as I was concerned it was the marriage of Palestine and Israel. It was presented very innocently, which indicated that we did not want to go too far politically, and as a result people were almost moved by it. The person speaking Hebrew then had a scarf around her head and thus became an Iranian woman. That was a whole series of associations that most people in Flanders missed. That gives me a feeling of disappointment. A performance is then dismissed as superficial, and that upsets me. Because you can also approach the superficiality of things in different ways.

The surface actually tells you a lot about the substance of a thing, its innermost part. The surface gives your imagination the space to approach these depths.’

The question then arises of whether he would be prepared to work on ‘keys’ that would enable audiences to interpret them more easily. This is a sensitive matter and Sidi Larbi sees it as part of a broader story:

‘There is a big difference between ‘keys’ you can give the audience and the prior expectations people have of the performance. People so often have pre-formed ideas and prejudices with which I have already been sufficiently confronted, being half Moroccan, half Flemish and homosexual. To me it’s the same whether it’s about art or choreography or theatre or... There are simply certain things about which I know ‘that still moves me’ and ‘that still makes me angry’. Back to the theatre: it would surely be one of the finest things if a critic could simply write that he was not able to understand it all. We live in an age when it is impossible still to be able to say that. Whereas if one were to do so, space might be made for someone to explain it. It is certainly important to find out what the logic is behind an artistic work. After all, one onlyhas a very limited view and you must make the effort once in a while to open up the way you look at things.’

In search of religious dance

We carry on talking for some time about this insight. It is clear that for Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui it applies to the social, political and artistic spheres. And that all these areas are linked in his working practice and in his person. If he had to categorise his work, where would he put it? The answer is surprising, and yet it isn’t.

Sidi Larbi: ‘If I have to label myself, I would rather go in the direction of religion. I increasingly want to say, ‘I create religious dance’. The idea of religion is actually ‘joining together’. Joining an audience to what happens on stage, in a sort of ritual. I want to think of a performance in terms of a ritual where people come together to stage something that may be a reflection of reality, perhaps a reflection of the future, or the past. That’s the way I see it, much more than
something concerning my ego. Whether that has anything to do with any higher value there may be... It is regrettable that the word ‘religion’ is so often misunderstood. In that respect, what is so good about dance, compared to drawing and things like that, is that it is a social art. You have to talk to or dance with someone all the time. And it is not always a language question. You communicate through your body and words. Dance has a tremendous social aspect.’

So is this social aspect at the heart of religion?

Sidi Larbi: ‘Yes, ‘people together’, that’s the idea. I feel that in everything I do I have constantly been in search of religion, something that connects me to things. It is not really a question of giving things a meaning. You can find meaning in being alone, and entering into relationships is something else. I don’t want to reduce meaning to relationships. I do not find it pointless to draw or dance alone, I just think it brings me greater happiness to work and talk with people. I also understand myself better then. Ultimately others are a sort of mirror; they give you a sounding-board, and you say things you didn’t even know you thought.’
There is a lightness in the way Sidi Larbi leads us through the essential insights and extreme feelings and sensitivities in his work. It moves seemingly effortlessly from emotion to understanding and back again. We have to recall the start of the interview, when he explained to us how he converts emotion into movement and vice versa. It is his craft. His physical and mental agility.

All that remains to us is to find out what Antwerp means to someone with such an international profile.

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui: ‘What I would really like is to have a home, and I would very much like that to be Antwerp. I am really looking for a space where I can bring everything together. A home is a place where you feel understood. Home is a place where people keep track of your work, where people think about what is good in it, what is going wrong, where people analyse but do not interfere artistically. That’s what I am looking forward to.’