Time :
This is the central theme of the performance. Time flies, and how do we relate to time? Time is a universal experience that is divided and interpreted differently by each culture; over the ages it has become globalised, and become a single experience of time, one human clock. The Egyptians divided time into 24 equal parts and the Mesopotamians divided the hours into minutes and seconds. The custom of starting the day at midnight came from the Romans. These are all conventions, human interpretations and agreements to get a grip on time, to make the experiencing of time more universal. In fact the relative movements of three heavenly bodies (sun, moon and earth) form the criterion for all experiences of time on earth. Tempus fugit is based, among other things, on this symbolic triangle. The human experience of time is something we all understand; from an early age you know that you get up in the morning, experience and divide the day into activities, go to bed at night, sleep, dream and recuperate at night and then get up the following morning. After a number of days (there are seven in European culture), weeks, months (there are twelve in European culture) you develop memories of certain days, certain moments of time in your past: ‘I will never forget that day, that afternoon’; we create new pillars of time (i.e. after my 18th birthday, after the 11th September) ranging from the very personal to the near global. We cut up the experience of time into pieces, a dissection of ‘time’ into ‘moments’ which later become ‘memories’.
In Tempus fugit I am starting from moments in time in, for example, the dancers’ and singers’ past; stories (narrated or danced) they have experienced in their past and which have made an abiding impression on them.
I also try to manipulate time conventions in order to play with the impression of time. Like on a video tape where you can rewind the time, pause moments in time, or fast forward them. In this way the dancers and singers appear to ‘control’ their own time.

Rhythm, speed and slowness :
Controlling time translates itself into dance rhythms and speeds; what is really fast and what is slow? At what point can you no longer discern what the dance movement signifies because of its speed? At what point is the movement so slow that it appears to have stopped? What is a normal rhythm? How do you experience acceleration? These contrasts are examined together with the dancers and an attempt is made to discover cultural links with trance rhythms, organic and inorganic acceleration as well as repetition.

Repetition and déjà-vu :
These repetitions reproduce something in the form of a loop, but if a repetition occurs at a much later stage and you have almost forgotten ‘the first time’, it is like a déjà-vu. You feel that you have already experienced the situation, but you remember it almost as if it were a dream. These are human impressions that sometimes appear to be highly mystical and it can be very interesting to development them in a performance.
An age in which people wish to remain eternally young:
The emotional relationship people have with time is extremely interesting. Time often appears to be something very neutral, but if you take a closer look you will discover that nothing could be further from the truth. Whether we are dealing with nostalgia (things were better in the old days) or an obsession with the future (when I grow up …), it would seem that man finds it difficult to be in the present, as if the dissection of time into ‘periods’ and ‘moments’ renders these ‘moments’ more important than the flow of the experience of time. We live from one ‘important moment’ to the next and we are no longer interested in the situations in between; despite the fact that these too are ‘moments’.
Nostalgia, a form of sorrow or of loss that relates to the past, is interesting in that it is something we all feel. The fear of ageing (turning 30, 40, 50, etc.) is also an interesting theme; it is as if you do not want to leave a certain situation and want to remain in a certain age category. Does this have anything to do with time? Are we victims of time, or rather of our divisions of time?
A human body builds itself up and recycles and restores itself before degenerating. This process appears to be inevitable and is therefore very frightening. This is an absolute fact. It is insurmountable. We play with this idea in Tempus fugit and attempt to see it from another angle. Time is no longer our master but a dance partner. We also seek what is unique in each moment of our lives as an individual human being. So that each moment has its own space, without being clouded by other moments (from the past or future). And this means enjoying the present.

Enjoyment :
Time flies when you’re having fun. Of course, in Tempus fugit we examine the pleasure of dancing (as experienced by dancers and audience alike). Enjoyment is often linked with humour, which is a very important element in both Rien de rien and Foi. You can also associate enjoyment with briefly forgetting where you are and not looking at your watch (a sign of boredom), but simply experiencing the moment and ‘feeling at home’ in the performance. Pleasure can also be translated into surprises, discoveries and unexpected situations that carry you along. On a journey, a journey through time.
An obsession with the past, the future and the present:
The future becomes now, the present becomes the past and the past is… forgotten?
How can one learn from others’ experiences (the past) or your own? ‘Wherever an ass falls, there will he never fall again’; nevertheless history seems to repeat itself in different forms. Indeed, after my experiences in Foi (2003) this is what I thought; the crusades and the plague in the 14th century appear to be very similar to the war in Iraq and the epidemics in our world today (SARS, Aids, etc.). Nevertheless I would like to question this and my own personal decisions in this next step, this next performance.
Are we stuck in a loop? Apart from this human ‘constant’, what actually changes? In what way are we evolving? What has been lost, and what have we recovered? What is new? What is innovative or original?
The word ‘original’ may contain the answer to where we might find its significance. In the word ‘original’ we see the word ‘origin’ which means the same as source, roots, ancestors. Who knows, the word ‘innovative’ may mean something that relates to your own origin. How you use or reject all these elements from your upbringing, and cultural and artistic background, or whether you cause your past to evolve or mutate towards a future in a manner that is almost organic. This mutation or evolution is where your present is found, situated between other moments.

Music and singing :
On a musical level, in Tempus fugit we attempt to introduce songs, many of which are very old, from the oral traditions of different cultures. The idea of these often very simple melodies is not to glorify or revive a time that has passed, but to provide an answer to the search for what is timeless. At times, and just for the duration of a song, time seems to have come to a halt. Although the songs appear to come from a long way off, you feel naturally and almost instinctively that they are related to your past, as if they are written in your own blood and in your genes. It is almost a homecoming or reconciliation with a time that precedes your own past. The songs are largely passed on by oral tradition, in a manner that is very like a part of the repertoire of Foi. This makes it difficult if not impossible to clearly put a date on their origin. Which also makes every song even more ‘un-time-related’, as if a song has always existed and will continue to exist for centuries to come; the melody, the timbre, the harmonies are still passed on from generation to generation.

Timeless dancing :
We also look for these moments of timelessness in dance. The movements are therefore inspired by more artificial experiences of time (fast forward, digital images, etc.), as well as by more nature-related experiences such as trees in the wind, incoming and outgoing tides, a flower that slowly opens, etc. The lines and dynamism of these phenomena are translated. Other sources of inspiration for movements are the laws of gravity. Tricks are performed using the earth’s force of attraction on all matter, so as to reproduce natural and unnatural impressions. The perception of time has everything to do with gravitation; as has already been mentioned, the human division of time itself is determined by the laws of gravity as they act between the sun, the earth and the moon. The earth itself operates on the basis of our different speeds. Every upward movement resists the force of gravity, every downward movement is accelerated, aided by the force of gravity. Falling more quickly or slowly suddenly appears to be unnatural. In this way we discover our norm, the normal speed of a falling body. Manipulating this is therefore also a form of controlling time.

Blurring boundaries :
All these people come together from Belgium, Tunisia, Morocco, Korea, Burkina Faso, France, New Caledonia, Argentina, Israel, Senegal, Iraq, etc., in order to meet one another for the duration of a collective creation and a performance. Each person brings with him his own perception of rhythm and time, and his own norms and values. It is interesting to bring them face to face so that they can learn from one another. Despite what most people think, mixing cultures did not only start to evolve in the last century. These influences have been in existence since the very first encounters, the first wars, the first reconciliations; from the Middle Ages and the crusades, which created both havoc and new forms, to colonisation in Africa and the Arab world, and on to the political situation today. How do all these individuals relate to their own country, their past and to one another? Where does the past stop being a problem for the future? Does time heal all wounds?

Relationships :
All these identities, countries and individuals are no (longer) all that exceptional in a performance; multiculturalism has become a generally accepted thing and is nothing extraordinary in the artistic field. It is not the exotic nature of all these different places and the differences that are interesting. What is interesting are the relationships, the things that bind, that link one country with another. Room for innovation is created in
the balance, the relationship between two elements. Together, and in complete symbiosis, something very original is created that cannot or is simply not allowed to be placed in a former setting. In Tempus fugit we focus on the Mediterranean region, and the Arab and West African world and the way in which they relate to one another. In the field of music, Christine Leboutte and Damien Jalet bring us songs from Albania, Corsica and Southern Italy. In addition to this, the music group Weshm, lead by Najib Cherradi, brings us Arab songs from Morocco (different styles of melchoun, garnati, gilala, etc.) and songs that are influenced by all the surrounding countries, even extending as far as Afghanistan.
In this way, Isnel Da Silveira and Serge-Aimé Coulibaly rediscover a number of West-African songs. The other dancers also colour the performance with their voices and movements, in search of a common world, in search of a common time. The themes of the songs range from religion to love, from lullabies to songs of mourning, and from songs of joy to war songs. The themes are surprisingly universal. Indeed, despite the fact that they come from different cultures, human affairs appear to be very similar wherever you may come from. Just as in Rien de rien and Foi, these themes will indirectly influence the story and the drama of the dance.

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui.


Inspiration, documentation, influences,…:

‘(…)’ Memento mori:

Our subconscious does not believe in our own death. What we call ‘subconscious’, the part of our soul that consists of our deepest instincts, knows nothing that is negative – no denial or contrasts converge there – and therefore has no knowledge of its own mortality, which we can only regard as being a negative concept.
…
We are used to pointing out the coincidental cause of death, the accident, the illness, the infection, a person’s advanced years; in this way we betray our striving to render death not a necessity, but rather something that is coincidental and unimportant.
Sigmund Freud (Zeitgemässes über Krieg und Tod)

To the dreamer of immortality: So you want eternal life for this beautiful consciousness of yours? Is this not shameless? Do you not think of all the other things you would have to bear for all eternity, just as they have thus far born you with a patience that is more than Christian? Or do you think that these could give you eternal pleasure? Indeed, just one immortal man on earth would be enough to drive everything else there might be there to a general fury of death and hanging through surfeit of him! And all you other inhabitants of the earth with your little concepts of a couple of thousand minutes of time think you can harass eternal life at large! Surely there is nothing more obtrusive than this?!
Friedrich Nietzsche (Morgenröte)

A comfort that can be applied at all times and understood by all is this: ‘Death is as natural as life and we shall see what happens afterwards.’
Arthur Schopenhauer (In Search of a Good Old Age)

Regard each day that has presented itself as your last; and be filled with gratitude for every unexpected hour.
Horatius

"Tempus fugit" - Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui & Les Ballets C. de la B. within the scope of ImPulsTanz on July 29th and 31st -9pm- at Volkstheater
Festival - Program