Company Nacera Belaza, Into the Night. Shubbak Festival, Sadler's Wells, Thursday 23 July.
ref. Post 22: So on some level we are left with faith and trust. Faith,
that there is something true to be seen and heard. Trust, that the
performer is the one to help us do it.
Which is why an experience at Sadler’s Wells last night left
me so curious.
Photo: David Balicki
Nacera Belaza was awarded a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture in 2015. Algerian-born, Belaza's eponymous company is based in France and the programme indicates an extensive run of international performances and residencies. She describes her work as a 'quest...to enhance the bond between performer and spectator' and calls her work an exacting discipline focussed on the 'condition of the dancer'. The link to Sufism, and the trance-like spinning and patternings of her work, begs the question, in what way is this choreography? --as the turning in circles and amplifying patterns-in-the-universe is meditation, not choreography, in Sufic practices.
But per se this is not the focus of this review.
The Sadlers' Wells and Shubbak (Festival of Arab Culture) audience is antagonistic from the start. The programme indicates 'duration two hours, no interval--latecomers not admitted’ in a way that sounds like a prison sentence, and from what I hear in whispers around me, gets many in the audience off-side.
But per se this is not the focus of this review.
The Sadlers' Wells and Shubbak (Festival of Arab Culture) audience is antagonistic from the start. The programme indicates 'duration two hours, no interval--latecomers not admitted’ in a way that sounds like a prison sentence, and from what I hear in whispers around me, gets many in the audience off-side.
The extremely dim lighting is very beautiful, but problematic too. A football-stadium type lighting grid emits light at such low level that it is indeed
hard to discern the performing bodies at times. More problematic is the imbalance between what that light lets one discerns onstage and the way the same light picks out audience-members' white shirts like beaming
icons. I am lucky the man in front of me seems patient and still,
for if he had been as perturbed by the slow unfolding and prolonged repetition of the works as some in the audience, my concentration would
have had no chance.
The piece had walkouts aplenty, across the front of the stage, with one woman using the torchlight on her mobile phone to guide her in the dim light; to tittering groups deciding to leave only after disrupting the rest of us for more than an hour. The dancers worked with quietude and discipline--strange twitching creatures in the Les Oiseaux duet, and in La Traversee, the 3 dancers turning like spirograph. The sound was a mix of sound installation, neo-Reichian pulse and muted Arabic chant--in itself mesmerising, but failing to tame the disgruntled in the audience. Ironically, it was just when I felt the work deepen and my body (and that of my white-shirt neighbour) begin to sway—in Sufi and Hindu performance traditions, a sign we had reached ‘the zone’—that the performance abruptly ended. This was surely the work's beginning. Ironically, the pre-recorded sound score was only 90 minutes, not 2 hours. A mismatch of timings, expectations and perceptions on so many levels.
The piece had walkouts aplenty, across the front of the stage, with one woman using the torchlight on her mobile phone to guide her in the dim light; to tittering groups deciding to leave only after disrupting the rest of us for more than an hour. The dancers worked with quietude and discipline--strange twitching creatures in the Les Oiseaux duet, and in La Traversee, the 3 dancers turning like spirograph. The sound was a mix of sound installation, neo-Reichian pulse and muted Arabic chant--in itself mesmerising, but failing to tame the disgruntled in the audience. Ironically, it was just when I felt the work deepen and my body (and that of my white-shirt neighbour) begin to sway—in Sufi and Hindu performance traditions, a sign we had reached ‘the zone’—that the performance abruptly ended. This was surely the work's beginning. Ironically, the pre-recorded sound score was only 90 minutes, not 2 hours. A mismatch of timings, expectations and perceptions on so many levels.
"So on some level we are left with faith and trust. Faith, that there is something true to be seen and heard. Trust, that the performer is the one to help us do it."
ReplyDeleteThis is the orientation we need our examiners to have.