Lost soles

Nehad Selaiha discovers the poetry of footwear at the opening of the 6th Festival for Dance Theatre

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The inaugural ceremony at the Main Hall of the Opera House was brief and elegant; Walid Aouni, the festival's director, said a few words by way of welcome and introduction, the ambassador of Switzerland, Egypt's European partner this year, made a short speech, then Abdel-Moneim Kamel, the opera director, formally announced the opening of the 6th Festival for Dance Theatre. The lights dimmed on stage then came on again five minutes later to mark the start of Les Affluents by the Compagnie Philippe Saire from Switzerland. One expected music, any kind of sound, but this did not come until a while later. In dead silence, a young man, casually and somewhat shabbily dressed, walked onto the big, empty stage, crossing it diagonally from one corner at the back to the opposite point up front, lugging two old, grimy sacks which he dumped right in front of us. For a moment they seemed the only objects in this vast, faintly lit, eerily quiet space. At the back, stretching right across the stage as a permanent backdrop, was a white screen featuring two rows of numbers, from 1 to 8, in bold black, the upper row in a jumbled order and the lower in a straight one. If you looked hard enough, you could barely make out two sets of black cubes lining the sides, one carrying the first letters of the alphabet, the other similar numbers to the ones on the screen but in white. Where we were exactly, you couldn't tell. It could be any place, but certainly one far removed from the posh, glittering opera world, in some dingy corner of the world, in a dismal and most inhospitable environment. Suddenly, while you are still trying to find your bearings and wondering about the identity of this imaginary, godforsaken location, the young man pulls open the two sacks and proceeds to fish out all kinds of footwear and hurl them around the stage in a rising crescendo. Before you know it, the stage is swarming with shoes of all types and shapes.

It seemed to me I had never seen so many shoes in my whole life and their sheer number and the sight of them whizzing across the stage in every direction then resting on the floor in heaps or singly had a strange, thrilling effect, at once childish and liberating. Never mind where they came from or how the man collected or came to be burdened with them -- he could be a second-hand shoe-dealer or a kind of scavenger for all I cared; what seemed to matter was that they were palpably old shoes which belonged to absent people and that the man had finally grown sick and tired of them and decided to be rid of them, to literally throw them behind his back. His decision and action figuratively recreated the shoes into symbols of all the restrictive identity casts and moulds we inherit from the past and long to be rid of in order to literally find our own feet and get a first-hand feel of the earth. But old habits die hard and old traditions too; just as humanity has learnt the value of protective footwear, it has also realised that in the search for one's true identity, one easy solution is to adopt ready-made identity models, however distorting or falsifying. The sense of liberation inspired by the sight of the man forcefully hurling his load of old shoes behind his back is soon undercut by the arrival on the scene of other young people -- all barefoot -- and their repeated attempts to find a pair that fits.

This reading of the first sequence in Philippe Saire's Les Affluents coloured my reception and interpretation of the rest of the show. In this derelict, urban wasteland, strewn with castoff shoes, the eight young dancers looked alternately like lost children, rummaging in a rubbish dump for something to play with, or frolicking around some dreary, old nursery, or like teenagers engaged in a violent pecking-order and ruthlessly daring, mocking and terrorising each other with knives and fake guns in some back street slum. No wonder the choreography and musical score seemed deliberately haphazard, freewheeling, almost chaotic and occasionally positively crude. More often than not, the movement register was the quotidian and mundane; but just as they did with shoes, transforming the humble objects into symbols and visual metaphors, Saire and his company managed to build the ordinary, banal kinetic vocabulary of daily life into powerful, meaningful patterns, alternately violent, funny and moving, which highlighted the tensions and deeply buried motives underlying familiar gestures and movements. Was it the Russian Formalists who said that the function of poetry was to "defamiliarise" the world and make us look at it with fresh eyes? This is exactly what Saire and his company achieved in Les Affluents and the wonder of it is that they managed it using only the most familiar.

Nevertheless, and though the audience seemed to enjoy the performance while it lasted and loudly applauded it at the end, the combination of familiar material and defamiliarising treatment, particularly in the absence of a story-line, however flimsy, was bound to baffle and frustrate many in the opera that night. "What does it mean?" buzzed round as we left the hall. Dance as "expression" of meanings that can be put in words, a way of telling a story in a different, visual language is still favoured by the majority of audiences in Egypt. And Walid Aouni definitely and quite defiantly takes a risk when he hosts in his festival choreographic creations in which "meaning" is not definitively preset and pre-packed. In Les Affluents, which significantly evokes in the title the image of many water jets running into or colliding with each other, the generation of meaning is the shared responsibility of performers and audience and is conditionally a process of interaction -- the interaction of the dancers with each other, with the performance space and the objects on it, and with the audience. This explains why the dancers always seemed conscious of an audience, of playing to it rather that just dancing, and occasionally addressed it directly. This intense, persistent audience-consciousness on the part of the performers was a bit unsettling at first but gradually produced a measure of rapport and I do not doubt that the response would have been much stronger and more convivial in a more intimate space, with a younger audience and on a less formal occasion. But, most likely, Aouni wanted to set the tone of the festival at the very beginning, regardless of the forbidding, uncongenial surroundings, and it is a credit to Saire's dancers that they managed some loud vocal interaction with the auditorium on this occasion beside drawing a lot of laughter.

"We draw the power to defend ourselves, to parry against attack, from our experience and from the powers that bring us together," says Saire in a note to Les Affluents in the festival catalogue. Such "powers" can "melt us as individuals into an anonymous amalgam in which -- we hope -- joy may also be present," he adds. Embedded in these words is a concept of theatre as empowerment for both the individual and the group. What is crucial in this concept, however, is that the melting into an anonymous amalgam and the joy it brings does not entail the erosion of individuality; indeed, it can only be subsequent to its fulfillment. Saire is intensely aware of the difficulty of safeguarding individual identity within a group -- what he describes as the theme of Les Affluents. In 2001, together with the company's eight dancers and in close collaboration with sculptor and set designer Massimo Furlan, costume designer Isa Boucharlat, composer Pascal Desarzens and light designer Dominique Dardant, he created a two-part project conceived, as he puts it, as a "self- questioning process, an interrogation into identity, restlessness, risk-taking and the difficulty of asserting our personality in the troubled world around us". The first part of the project was Impostures, a production consisting of a series of solos representing a gallery of characters. The second was Les Affluents which continued the exploration of the question of individual identity, brining it head-on- collision with the intrinsic human need to be part of a group. It is this paradox which lies at the heart of Les Affluents and informs every sequence in it, particularly the comic ones.

Take the two male dancers who start a hand game, each trying to prove his adroitness at evading the other's touch until their palms accidentally meet and get stuck to each other; the rest of the sequence consists of the two men's desperate, violent, acrobatic and quite hilarious manoeuvres to undo the friendly clasp. Or take the scene where a man dances with a girl, holding her closely to his bosom with one hand while the other points a gun at her head; or the scene where a man goes through one dance routine after another to impress both his colleagues and the audience and draws nothing but laughter and mockery every time; or the scene where the dancers lie on their backs, on top of each other, so that all we could see of them is a mass of jumbled human legs where any pair could belong to any of them; or the one where they lie, again on top of each other, but this time sideways, to form a human pyramid with a line of faces in the middle and sloping bodies on either side; not to mention the vigorous stick-baiting and fighting scenes.

Saire describes Les Affluents as "a distorted, tragi- comic view of reality, where risk is overstated, and where derision can overrun a situation even to the point of highlighting it. Nightmarish terrors, reassuring laughter, imagined ogres, sheets to hide under. A reminder of childhood, that far-off time when we believed that fears would one day disappear." It seems no artist ever outgrows his/her childhood and that the profounder they get, the closer to it they move. Les Affluents draws a lot of its freshness and zest and its quizzical, paradoxical view of things and people from the world of children and teenagers and manages to inspire in the viewer a sense of unbounded vitality coupled with pathetic frailty and child-like wonder. Charmingly simple, funny and unpretentious on the surface, Les Affluents has a lot of inventive, imaginative energy and many insightful moments. Hopefully more shows of this calibre will follow in the festival, both on the Egyptian and Swiss fronts.