“C Off the square. “C A R C A S S” by Marco Da Silva Ferreira. Photo © Jose Caldeira
For La Biennale de danse du Val de Marne 2023 the energy- in-creativity exemplified by Aina Alègre’s This is not an “Act of Love and Resistance” has a consistently “hip hop feel” even when it’s not hip-hop by any usual yardstick of entertainment culture.
I’m riffing more than a bit on John Ruskin to say what I’ll now say. Liberty Hall, as my mother used to say.
It’s a fact that over the past 50 years, hip hop – absorbing then concretizing Aquarian counterculture in the practical details of staying alive, joyful and in broad solidarity – has become a way of thinking, doing and living that has popular roots, ideology, legend and global reach. And when it comes down to it, hip hop is about the whole body-brain and its articulation in the real world and the sacred space humans occupy in that world.
Let’s say that a “hip hop feel” comes down to an assumption that the goal of choreography is to make dance performance “happen”, to expand into “un-narrative space” and enable Imagination. For me, at least, there’s a firm line back from hip hop to Emerson to Isadora Duncan’s re-occupation of the Pantheon, and to the Age of Aquarius.
… /
The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!
Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity!
Everyman’s an angel!
/ …
– “Footnote to Howl” – Allen Ginsberg
Because of its unique ability to carry along energy-in-creativity – hip hop is now long beyond a genre influence. As ballet has been, it is the reference point around which a new dance performance culture is framing. Think: Wu Tang Clan, Ballets Russes.
While most of the choreographers on show at this year’s La Biennale come to the “hip hop feel” from outside the scene, I think that choreographer performer Anne Nguyen’s contribution, Matières premières (“Raw/Source materials”), along with her life experience, best exemplify the hip hop feel that inhabits the persons and performances on show at La Biennale 2023. Nguyen has been in residence at La Briqueterie for the creation of Matières Premières and, as the new creation shows, she naturally and directly distills out the energy-in-creativity ethic that is increasingly taking over dance performance creation.
At 45 and long an artiste associé at the National Dance Theater (Chaillot), and, among other things, a poet and author of Manuel du Guerrier de la Ville (“Urban Warrior’s Manual”) Nguyen is not just a grown up b-girl, she’s a culture figure and culture bearer.
Although clearly tied into the global urban dance scene by training and attitude, Matières Premières’ builds on the African origins of its performers by their way of holding themselves as people, by country village-style mimetics and by billing the piece as “an initiation voyage” that joins the living present and the dead past. For a reason I don’t clearly understand, Matières brings to mind Amos Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts: you can say the story is a metaphor for a reality or you can say it is what happens.
The troupe takes a simple line form and frames what happens with the people in the line by repeating mimes of sowing seed and digging. Matières holds together flawlessly – the troupe synchronizes, desynchronizes, resynchronizes seamlessly. Performers smile and invite amusement, project harmonious awareness and personal rigor, execute a choreography that joins just about every hip-hop dance riff that you can think of into complementary phrases, along with, alongside and ahead of a varied music score. If there is a concept or archetype behind the choreography, it is “to give voice to”. However that may be, Matières works perfectly as movement art. Karine, my girlfriend, thought the troupe interpreted the music perfectly; I thought the music was perfectly fitted to the performance. So, the piece uses both music and movement to both build internal energy and enter spectator sensibilities. Then, to shape and direct the energy and sensibility, the choreography manages to frame its mimetic gestures on several levels: evoking origins, playing as in an unseen play, invoking sympathetic magic (the reflex to think of our bodies as analogs to the world and vice versa). The “initiation voyage” turns out to be “happening” – creation of a space for Imagination.
In the context of straight performance, it is possible to find the hip hop feel in the themes or subthemes. For instance, the first La Biennale 2023 performance I went to was Yasmine Hugonnet’s Les Porte-Voix Cabaret ventriloque – récit vocal et chorégraphique (“Carrying voices – Ventriloquist cabaret: vocal choreographic recital”) – a performance piece par excellence. Done by Hugonnet and three other equally top-notch artists, the performance unpacks the many possible experiences/senses of “oracle”, Les Porte-Voix choreographs sound/fragment-words/senses and ventriloquism to point the very complex notion of “giving voice to” – one of the basic ideas of hip hop (lately, especially in its incarnation as Krump). If “poets, priests and politicians” or other Others have ever interfered with your transmissions, you know why “to give voice to” is an archetype, as well as why Hugonnet goes “un-narrative” or experiential to get at it.
A focus on energy generated in creativity is what joins Hugonnet’s performance piece to Marco da Silva Ferreira’s pretty obviously hip hop inspired C A R C A S S. The piece uses music by a deejay and drummer on the edge of the stage and pretty much puts spectators in the same frame of experience as the hypnotic repetitions of Lucinda Childs’ Dance, with which it was in a double header at Maison des Arts de Créteil, formerly popular hip-hop and contemporary choreographer Mourad Merzouki’s development center.
I don’t think I was alone to see The Ballet de Lyon’s Dance and da Silva Ferreira’s C A R C A S S one after the other or to find points of communion in them.
For all that da Silva Ferreira clearly buys into hip hop as a genre as much as say Anne Nguyen, both pieces focus on building an energy that enables “happening”, both come off as coherent energy lifting and pulling spectators with them. The Ballet de Lyon lays a holographic video of the original piece over the live performance so that it is, quite literally, accompanied by its past and simultaneously dramatized and commented. Building away from the formal “ballet” tradition, Childs and Glass looked to repetition and fascination to make Dance happen as dance. Building out of hip hop where form has always been about conjuring energy and where experiment is the name of the game, Da Silva Ferreira just assumes happening is dance; performer movement builds energy, leads and shapes happening.
When I think about other performances on the bill, I see hip hop energy taking many shapes, remaking old genres. Krump, now a very, very popular break-dance style, is a good example of how hip hop has become the broad church of dance performance. Aside from allowing frenzy, I can’t really see what makes Krump different in form to other break dance. A couple of years back I asked the brilliant Krump choreographer performer Nach if Krump was hip hop psychotherapy. She said I could put it like that. So I do.
Nach’s recent Elles disent, a Krump-based piece so full of take-it-for-granted innovation and intelligence, it’s hard to know where to start praising it, especially puts a finger on a conjunction of catharsis/ expression in hip hop and contemporary dance. I think “Krump” designates more choreographic intention than performance form; the frenzy in it has more of catharsis in it than the free expression in contemporary dance has.
All this being said, I came out of Maud Le Pladec’s Krump-inspired Silent Legacy, feeling that I had witnessed a “battle ballet”: two “life passages” framed in Krump body energy. Le Pladec puts together Adeline Kerry Cruz, an 8- year-old b-girl prodigy, a grand bear of a b-boy, choreographer, teacher and DJ called Jr Madripp, who plays the psychoanalyst/facilitator, and Audrey Merilus, a 20-something b-girl. The battle format and Madripp’s central role makes for a diptych presentation, (contrast rather than comparison), which, in turn, makes of Krump catharsis a form of ballet.
Adeline Cruz – in a baseball cap, sneakers, bowl-cut thick blonde-brown hair – takes up a pose of a wound-up urban warrior gathering herself “to give voice to-be” herself. She explodes into the extremely athletic version of strict body control, throwing her chest out as if to show her bursting heart, ready to accept her vulnerability through a relation of confidence with Maddrip (she actually perches on his broad shoulders). The girl’s age and break dance expertise highlight the animating intention behind Krump. For instance, her 8-year-old body has more force than heft, so vigorous moves such as stamping make her rebound, fly.
As Madripp and Cruz are leaving the stage, Madripp makes a heart with joined hands. From this gesture, I suddenly see in Cruz’ performance a “dying swan”, feeling, the value of life: an animating archetype of “to give voice to-be me” embedded in highly formalized dance. When Audrey Merilus follows Cruz on stage in my eyes her performance contrasts as the fragment “Giselle risks dance” or “be- grow to risk to be”. Merilus female’s body is very much part of the performance – not exotic, not esthetic, not erotic, it says, ‘this is how my voice is’. Her first posture is ready-set-go = “grow-go”. With the same expert control as her young collaborator, Merilus explodes on stage but also off stage: “be-risk-grow”.
Call it energy-in-creativity, “hip hop” or dance with popular roots, ideology, legend and global reach, La Briqueterie’s offer is about the whole body & brain.
Be-risk-grow. Put La Briqueterie on your bucket list.
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As part of La Briqueterie’s La Biennale 2023 program, I saw Yasmine Hugonnet’s “Les Porte-“Voix Cabaret ventriloque – récit vocal et chorégraphique” performed by Matthieu Barbin, Ruth Childs, Madeleine Fournier, Yasmine Hugonnet at Atelier de Paris on 15 March 2023. Hugonnet’s “Peau de l’espace” was also featured on the festival bill ; Maud Le Pladec’s “Silent Legacy”, performed by Adeline Kerry Cruz, Jr Madripp, Audrey Merilus on 25 March 2023 at the Salle Jacques Brel, Fontenay-sous-Bois ; Marco da Silva Ferreira’s “C A R C A S S” performed by André Garcia, Fábio Krayze, Leo Ramos, Marc Oliveras Casas, Marco da Silva Ferreira, Maria Antunes, Max Makowski, Mélanie Ferreira, Nelson Teunis, Nala Revlon on 16 March 2023 at Maison des arts de Créteil (MAC) ; Anne Nguyen’s Matières premières as performed by Ted Barro Boumba alias “Barro Dancer”; Dominique Elenga alias “Mademoiselle Do”; Mark-Wilfried Kouadio alias “Willy Kazzama”; Jeanne D’Arc Niando alias “Esther”; Grâce Tala; Seïbany Salif Traore alias “Salifus”; Joseph Nama alias “Jo Kiero” on 5 April 2023 at Théâtre des 2 Rives , Charenton-le-Pont. I saw Nach’s “Elles disent” performed by Adelaïde Desseauve, Manon Falgoux, Sati Veyrunes, Nach, Sophie Palmer at Atelier de Paris on 2 February 2023 as part of the Faits d’Hiver 2023 program.
Other creators and performance dance creations featuring in La Biennale 2023 included Jonas & Lander, “Bate Fado”; Nadia Beugre, “Legacy” along with Robyn Orlin’s “In a corner the sky surrender – unplugging archival journeys… #1 (for Nadia♥)”; Volmir Cordeiro & Calixto Neto performing Lia Rodrigues’ “Outrar”; Roser Montilo Guberna & Brigitte Seth, “Salti”; Monika Gintersdorfer, Timor Litzenberger, Carlos Martinez, Mugler and a computer performing “Trio (for the beauty of it)”; Volmir Cordeiro with Cie Donna Volcan, “Abri” and; Tânia Carvalho, “Versa Vice”.
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Author: Paul Tracy DANISON
