Reaching out
Nehad Selaiha enjoys the fruits of a dual modern dance workshop at the Creativity Centre
For a whole month, American choreographer Kwame A Ross -- founder and artistic director of Prophecy Dance Company, among other things -- worked concurrently with both the students of the Modern Dance School which opened last year and members of the Opera Modern Dance Company. Both the company, which dates back to 1993 (though its corps de ballet has principally changed many times since), and the recent school are the brainchild of Walid Aouni. The first was a dream come true; the second is intended to ensure that new blood keeps flowing into the company that this hard-won reality may continue to live and bloom. Though multi-talented as an homme de theatre -- a dancer, painter, inspired choreographer and exquisite scenographer -- with long, professional experience in all fields, Aouni has preserved a childlike, avid curiosity about what lies outside of himself, both as man and artist, and is always looking about, reaching out for fresh experience, knowledge and new meeting points and sharing them with his students and dancers. This has led him to launch the opera annual Modern Dance Festival which has brought to Egypt some of the best companies and newest trends in Europe; and it is the reason why he made it part of the school programme to expose the students to varied choreographic styles and methods of work. Last year Dutch choreographer, Dreis Vanderpost, worked with them for two weeks, followed by another fortnight workshop with the French Olivier Rivereto.
This year he cast his net further afield, to the US, and with financial and logistical support from the cultural office of the United States Embassy in Cairo brought Kwame A Ross, and with him a magnificent, multi-talented composer and musician, Charles Vincent Burwell, who has collaborated with him over many works composing, arranging and performing original music for various pieces in the Prophecy Company repertoire. Both are Afro-Americans, with a keen interest in what they call "music and dance forms of the African Diaspora" and regularly practice teaching to transmit their knowledge and experience to young people. Both are currently working with the Urban Bush Women (an Afro-American company, based in New York, which consists of seven versatile female performers) and at the same time teaching at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Centre. This has made the workshop something of a double voyage: a reaching out to a different culture on the part of the Egyptian students and dancers; and a reaching back to their roots in Africa for Ross and Burwell. The rewards were immense, both sides declare.
Last Thursday was the time to celebrate the success of the project and also to say farewell. To mark this occasion a two-part or, rather, double-bill presentation was given at the cosy theatre of the Creativity Centre where the dance school is located in a spacious studio on an upper floor. The two pieces shared one overall theme framed in the title, Stepping Out of the Box, with each playing a variation on it. It was hit upon by Kwame and the members of both workshops and not imposed by either party. The aching for freedom is daily reality for most young people in Egypt; and for Kwame and Burwell, it must have touched a deep chord in their racial memory. It also helped that Kwame, while working on expanding the dancers' and students' physical and formal skills, had wisely opted, in both workshops, for the expressive tradition in dance, adopting the aesthetic approach of influential teachers like Louis Horst and Doris Humphrey -- an approach which, in Horst's and Carroll Russell's words (in their book, Modern Dance Forms, 1961), views "dance as expressing feeling through the natural languages of bodies and rhythms of life echoed in the essentials of choreographic form". The expressive tradition is better suited to budding dancers as well as to young ones of limited experience, such as the two workshops catered for. It would have been confusing and ultimately fruitless to have told them, as Michael Kirby advises in his article, "Postmodern Dance" (Theatre and Drama Review, 19. 1975), to "cease to think of movement in terms of music," not to be "involved with such things as meaning, characterization, mood or atmosphere" and that lighting and costume should ideally be used "only in formal and functional ways". Besides, such modern dance shows as have visited Egypt, and they are a blessed few, have never found favour with the public.
But Kwame's aesthetic approach was not expressive in the narrow, quasi-mimetic, over-generalised or self-involved personal sense. Someone once said that Afro- American art cannot help but be political in the widest and profoundest sense of the word. The same could be said of all post- colonial art I suppose. In the lecture which preceded the presentation, entitled Moving into the 21st Century (in which we were treated to video glimpses of Martha Graham' Duet, Bill T Jones' Still Here, Trisha Brown's Two Duets, Ulysses Dorcs's Episodes, Judith Jamison's Hymn, Urban Bush Women's Bitter Tongue, as well as a piece by Katherine Dunham) Kwame declared that though he had great admiration for Graham's style of "dancing through the heart", he was not himself a Graham dancer and went on to stress the importance of involvement with the community and tackling the many issues and challenges that face humanity in the new century. Though Stepping Out of the Box (performed in ordinary training gear with minimal lighting effects) anchored movement to some literary idea and a certain musical form in both parts, it went beyond mere self-expression or bodying forth a theme in movement, to hint at social, moral and political protest.
In the first piece, performed by the school, a group of young people, like the ones you see on street corners, at clubs or on university campuses, stand chattering and giggling. Suddenly they break up and turn to face us in rows and gaze at us for a few seconds -- expectantly? Defiantly? I am not sure. Whatever the interpretation it was at once pathetic and disturbing. They soon regroup then split once more, but this time one by one and as each steps forward, they perform a sequence of improvised movements which expresses the way they feel about themselves, about the world, or some inner pain or longing. At some point the live band (guitar, qanun, drums, a synthesizer), led by Burwell, comes into play and the group rejoin in a line, split into duos, trios or solos moving to different beats and rhythms. The sequences are once interrupted and at another point accompanied by verbal texts: the first, a poem, recited solo in Arabic by a female voice-over then in English by one of the dancers, is about two young lovers separated by a wall which, unfortunately has no hole in it as was the case in the story of Pyramus and Thisbe; the other is a two-line choral statement-cum-plea, chanted in chorus in Arabic then solo in English and Italian. It simply says that "if we loved each other a little bit more" there would be less human suffering; we could alleviate the sorrow of others "through the heat of our actions". The two texts thematically frame the performance, juxtaposing romantic love and human solidarity as variations or alternative routes to freedom out of the box of the self. The final part of the performance builds up human solidarity into a metaphor for salvation, imbuing it with spiritual, quasi-religious shades. The dancers regroup once more, forming a moving human mass which heaves forward laboriously in the dark, advancing towards a dim figure in a corner. They finally reach him, envelop him and carry him along a narrow path of red light on the floor. Blood? War? Sex? Life? Or all rolled into the one ambivalent mass we call experience? Is it the path towards maturity with all the pain, sorrow and violence it brings along?
At the end of the red path, the lonely figure they have embraced falls lifeless to the floor. They lift him up, in a manner vaguely reminiscent of the way Christ is picked up by disciples as he falls from the cross in paintings, and carry him forward. The sequence of falling and lifting up continues as they progress, this time along a path of soft, golden light, towards a bright circle at the other end. There, the limp, dying figure is restored to life and consciousness. He gazes at the circle of faces around him in wonder and touches their faces, first hesitantly, then gratefully and lovingly. At his touch, the dancers, one by one, seem to slip into a state of beatitude and glide away. Joyfully, almost ecstatically they feel their bodies, look around as if seeing the world for the first time, or like a newborn baby learning to focus for the first time. A ritual of Christian baptism or Islamic ablution follows as they mime washing themselves and splashing about in water; then they become children playing on the seashore and spattering each other with what we now feel is holy water while they embrace and whirl. Many will read the whole piece in the light of this final sequence and see it as a replaying in a different key of the old story of the Fall and the hope of redemption through Christ, but with the accent here firmly on human solidarity as the only hope, rather than a heavenly saviour or divine intervention. But regardless of any interpretation, what gives this piece emotional potency is the forceful clarity of the design coupled with the power of the music and the dancers' passionate sincerity and extreme youth.
The second piece, intended for professional dancers, was, naturally, more elaborate in choreographic and musical design but stuck to the same expressive aesthetic. Here romantic love and sexual passion face the might and power of repressive traditions, represented by the family, the community and even the military. The choreography follows a simple story-line, fleshing it out with forceful images, alternately sensuous and violent and in every detail you could feel Kwame striving for a combination of vigour and tenderness -- a synthesis of animal and spiritual energy. Though love seems to triumph as the example of the two lovers incites the young people of the community to rebel and even seems to convert the older members to a belief in love or at least a tolerance of it, the piece ends on a wistful, faintly ironic note. In the final scene, the young woman and her parents form a tableau vivant, expressing the traditional image of the happy, loving family, bathed in a red light while the young man stands across the stage, in a soft pool of white light. As the lights fade, the contrast between the red and white light spots suggests an implicit critical comment, even as the two lovers look at each other longingly and hopelessly across the darkness. It is an image that many young people in Egypt, longing to step out of the box and reach out to freedom will identify with and long remember.
Stepping Out of the Box played twice last Thursday, both times to a capacity audience, and still many people complained they couldn't get in. If you have missed it, you can see it after Ramadan as Walid Aouni has promised and hopefully this time it will have a longer run.
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 30 October - 5 November 2003 (Issue No. 662)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/662/cu1.htm