Believe it or not, my critical skepticism evaporated when I saw the golden horns.
A second before, Akal’s mythology is contrary to fact, its suppositions stretched beyond belief.
Dorothée Munyaneza’s golden horns? Macbeth’s AK47.
A second after, the priestess of Neith is processesing to center stage.
Keats is absolutely right: beauty is truth and truth is beauty.
The form, shape, color, size of the horns is beautiful.
Beautiful, their weight and balance lends their truth to the professional experience of choreographer, singer, poet and dance performer Dorothée Munyaneza.
Munyaneza’s well-crafted steps and gestures point the geometry of the body and its mechanics, link them to the geometry of heaven and the dance of its movement. Her trained voice ripens in the thrill of words that seem to stand earth and heaven, bring us all into the presence of the sacred.
As we walk through the cold, feeling dreamy, we wondered how to fit Munyaneza’s invocation of the sacred into our dance experience.
Why was the beauty there? How did the truth come out?
Karine, my partner, tells me she thinks of Akal as a concert, a long arrangement of movement that transfixes you with sound and stories savory with bits of sense and vision. Munyaneza, it seems to her, repeats phrases of movement until the audience turns them to dance, reforms and redoes figures of sound – rustling, tinkling, words, verse, notes, periods – until you see the goddess in the hymn. Talking in the bus shelter, others agree with Karine.
But I see Akal as a concept – a by-the-rules Aristotle-type cathartic script captured by Mriziga’s choreography and Munyaneza’s collaborative execution.
The concept is then powered on the nests of complex memory in audience members. Or the sacred, the longing for a joining of heaven and earth, may be as universal as the need for catharsis, an archetype.
As to Aristotle, archetypes and nests of memory and the truth in Akal: some years back, Karine and I were hiking. We ran into a young woman almost a girl squatting head-in-hands at the side of our path. She was dissociated, frightened but functional; we guessed she was going through a waxing psychosis, probably her first time. I know something about that, so we talked a little. She brightened, joined us walking until, around about nightfall, we came to our b&b.
The young woman chose to camp in a little stand of trees not far off. Early next morning, as we dressed, we saw her through our window, through the foggy dark, leaning against a tree. We asked her to share our breakfast.
She came and stood with us, tore off a hunk of baguette, put it to her lips and, catching first Karine’s eye, then mine, smiled, took a bite. She reached down, grabbed our thermos, splashed some coffee into her mug, sipped a little, set the mug down. We did the same.
She hefted up her backpack, went to the door, opened it, disappeared into the morning twilight.
Akal touched this memory, its story, set, choreography – the apparatus of beauty, truth. By conincidence, I think that what I say happened on our walk is also what a choreography must achieve: “being there with”. Different theologians say “being there with” is being “in the same Time as” or “in the presence of” – the god.
I first saw creator Radouan Mriziga’s choreography and performance style in a piece called 7 from earlier trilogy on creating space using the body, relating dance and choreography to architecture (sister pieces include the pieces 55, 3600) at Lafayette Anticipations’ “Echelle Humaine 2018” dance program.
Akal (“Earth”) completes ’s Mriziga’s three-part exploration of how to put dance at the center of knowledge. It began in 2019 with Tafunkt (“Sun”) and Ayur (“Moon”) in 2020. Mriziga, an alumni of Teresa de Keersmaeker’s P.A.R.T.S. dance-performance school now working from Brussels and Berlin, grew up in the countryside near Marrakech, Morocco, presumably, a child of a Tamasheq-speaking family: Tafunkt, Ayur and Akal, respectively, mean “Sun”, “Moon” and “Earth” in Tamasheq, the language of North Africa culture group variously called “Amazigh”, “Imazighen” or “Berbers” and/or, perhaps, Tuaregs. Mriziga says the Akal, Ayur and Tafunkt trilogy is his “Amazigh studies”, and explicitly links them to his earlier choreographic exploration of knowledge in space (the body and architecture), saying they deal with a different type pf knowledge: “time-space”. Each piece of this current trilogy is based on an Amazigh-shaped vision of three goddesses: the Greek goddess Athena, called “Tafunkt” on the other side of the Mediterranean; the Phoenician–Carthaginian goddess Tanit, Ayur, and, Akal, the Egyptian goddess Neith. With dance at their center, Mriziga’s pieces mean to enable a flattening (or de-hierarchization) of the information that makes up knowledge and highlight links between, in this case, the complex mythologies that inform the goddesses through time: What knowledge does dance bear through time-space?
I first saw Dorothée Munyaneza’s choreography and dance-performance earlier this year during a performance of her creation A Capella at Lafayette Anticipations’ season opening “Echelle Humaine” dance program.
A fine intelligence operating a subtly-trained body, Munyaneza uses her distinctive voice to establish her presence in performance space that belongs essentially to the audience. In a pellucid, body and form-revealing silver-lamé gown, only Dorothée Munyaneza’s voice is to be seen.
Like Mriziga, Munyaneza, who wrote the songs for Tafukt, the first of Mriziga’s “Amazigh studies”, likes to play on the links between Europe and Africa that dance-performance highlights, but also on links of individual experience, performance genres and cultures. Munyanez’s Mailles (“Links in a chain”) a choreography involving five women – a poet, flamenco dancer, a performance artist, and a choreographer who have influenced her work – gives a sense of her idea of how the links among people work, but also of her talent, style and presence.
Akal by Radouan Mriziga, was presented 9 December 2022 at Atelier de Paris CDCN for the Festival d’Automne 2022, Paris’ ongoing dance-performance festival
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Author: Paul Tracy DANISON
