This production premiered at the Zeeland Nazomerfestival in 2022. During the past Ascension weekend it was to be seen four times at deSingel. Each time full house.
The audience has clearly taken Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui to heart. This outstanding artist realized the total concept with a couple of Flemish companions on the road. Visual artist Hans Op de Beeck designed the staging, fashion designer Jan-Jan Van Essche created the costumes and Floris De Rycker composed music for three soloists and two musicians.
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui takes his dual nationality as a starting point in this production. Dutch politician Biesheuvel states in one of his writings: "You are born into a history, thrown into an era." Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui affirmed himself in the artistic. The arts in general as compensation, perfection and imperfection, the raw and unrefined, mankind's yearning for beauty. All of this resulted in a richly varied life with a sublime lustre. He immediately shot himself into the first division of contemporary dance. His curriculum is now dizzying.
Reflection
A man who has fundamental things to say from an autobiographical, inner urge. A dual descent: Flemish on his mother's side and Moroccan through his father's genes is partly an enrichment, sometimes also two weather fronts that come together and cause storms in your head. He once said in an interview: "As a child of migrants you immediately feel like you are at home and a visitor at the same time." Life is passing on. Knowledge and understanding, but also feelings, warmth and gentleness. He placed his dual nationality in confrontation and dialogue with each other in a cross-pollination.
Life remains grey if you don't colour it. This certainly cannot be said of this artist. Cherkaoui treads the grey zone between local rootedness and intercultural dialogue. He highlights the richness of his multicultural background and freed himself from clichés. The stage serves as a memory palace where past, present and future meet in an aesthetic and philosophical manifesto.
Staging
When the curtain opens you see a kind of refined warehouse with metal roof trusses and a dormer window. A shell casing in which rooms have been created. Grey tones predominate. On the front right a kind of grey, dusty still life has been created with enlarged paraphernalia: a jug, cup, candelabra, a book, a skull...
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYEIsHYfe_g&t=10s[/embed]
A group of fourteen dancers from all corners of the earth (Japan, America, Russia, Ukraine, Congo, Canada, Germany, Israel, Belgium…) step forward in black/white with a paintbrush in hand. They draw lines in the space to the beautiful sounds of musician and lute player Floris De Rycker and his ensemble Ratas del Viejo Mundo. The lute, a typically Flemish instrument whose predecessor is the Arabic oud. They dance in twos, in groups of three or four to end in a kind of round dance. In between, a man with a censer walks through the house to bless it and ward off evil spirits.
'Vlaemsch (chez moi)' has something of pointillism. Briefly and fragmentarily, peculiarities are touched upon, Flanders in the grip of the church, the Jews who found their place in Antwerp, the scouts, Rubens makes his appearance and even recites a little poem that strongly resembles the style and linguistic skill of Guido Gezelle. Bit by bit, colour is brought into the costumes in a variety of characters: a nurse, a butcher, a soldier, a bride, a spirited young girl, a beer porter…
In a four-poster bed rests the mater familias, embodied by singer Christine Leboutte. She is the red thread running through the production and provides explanation and commentary in French and Dutch. Halfway through the production she hoists herself into armour as Dulle Griet from the famous painting by Bruegel. She gets the company of cycling tourists and herself pedals hard on a stationary bike. A cross-pollination on multiple fronts.
In one, two, three an enormous table is set. First a square, shortly after it becomes a long, rectangular table. A tableau is created that evokes images of the painting 'The Last Supper'. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui does not limit himself to an impressive choreography but works with attributes in his productions time and again. Here they are frames. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui extracts everything that can be done with them down to the finest detail. He even creates a Wunderkammer with family portraits where the mater familias with pinpricks reveals the true nature of the individuals.
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui knows how to enchant and captivate the audience in a perfect build-up of serious, lyrical and comic interludes. The dancers perform phenomenal things such as rag doll movements, a Charlie Chaplin imitation, a capoeira fight, there is also a sightseeing tour. He also conveys that meanwhile some 32% of the Belgian population has migration roots or a foreign nationality.
As in many of his productions, he returns here to polyphony, the different voices, soft, powerful, high, ethereally vibrating, circling around each other. Beautiful Arabic and African sounds echo that unleash emotions. Tones that vibrate at the same frequency as the hidden places in your soul in a cultural reflection. The richness of other cultures. There is old French music, a distorted Flemish folk song and the beautiful three-part 'Mijn platte land, mijn Vlaandrenland' by Jacques Brel who had a love-hate relationship with Flanders.
At the end, the dancers wear their black/white outfit again, swirling around each other, painting each other in space. The synergy between dance, music and singing is impressive. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui once again makes the difference between conceptual art and art that simply grabs you purely through its visual power and underlying message.
