BABEL(words)

 

 

Credits

 

Choreography & direction: Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui & Damien Jalet

Visual concept & design: Antony Gormley

Produced by: Eastman, De Munt - Brussels

Co-produced by: Fondation d'entreprise Hermès, Etablissement Public du Parc et de la Grande Halle de la Villette (Paris), Sadler’s Wells (London), Festival Boulevard (Den Bosch, the Netherlands), Festspielhaus (St. Pölten), Grand Théâtre of Luxembourg, International Dance festival Switzerland - Migros Culture Percentage and Fondazione Musica per Roma (Rome).

 

Co-commissioned by the DASH ARTS (U.K.) season on Arabic arts in 2010, and supported by the Garrick Charitable Trust.

 

 

The following text was written by Karthika Nair for/with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui & Damien Jalet .

 

 

There are moments marked by the convergence of paths, others by the parting of ways. Then there are the intersections, instants bearing possibilities of continuation or disconnect, rupture or reconciliation.

 

Babel (Words) is in many ways such a moment: it is the third stage in two distinct journeys.

One whose first two parts are Foi and Myth, peopled by recognizable, almost archetypal protagonists who evolve or regress in specific environments, resisting or pursuing the transcendental beings that seem to rule their existence (there are dancers who play invisible angels in Foi; those that take on the garb of visible but incorporeal shadows in Myth).

The other, seen through Zero Degrees – Sidi Larbi’s duet with Akram Khan – and Sutra, the piece made with the warrior monks of Shaolin Temple, questions the links of ethnicity and identity, probing into the limits of a physical universe.

 

At first sight, the intersection feels unexpected, almost strange.

Foi and Myth are set in detailed and dramatized yet familiar worlds, strewn with material evidence of the quotidian, of a time and a place. The bustling world of tanztheater that Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui had begun exploring with Damien Jalet a decade ago.

 

Zero Degrees and Sutra unfold in an abstract, rather geometric universe.

A simple line across the stage provides the divide between life and death, belonging and alienation, east and west.

A body is the space occupied by the mind or conversely, the mind is a space delimited by the body.

All milestones set in the path that Antony Gormley and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui traversed together.

 

But at closer glance, Babel appears as inevitable, logical. Those protagonists of Foi and Myth who cross over into this new story have rid themselves of their controlling angels and shed their idiosyncratic shadows.

 

After surviving a post-apocalyptic gulag-like environment in Foi, a space where life and death repeated themselves in cycles, they found themselves in a timeless, inescapable purgatory in Myth, seeking deliverance, waiting for the way out, but realising in the end that there may be no saviour outside of the self…..

 

In Babel, they are whole and here, fully present in this earthly dimension and responsible for their fates. No longer can they attribute their actions or reactions to divine intervention, nor to the desires of their daemons, their darker selves. Ready to grasp their space, fight for it, perhaps share and even shape it, they approach the moment of reckoning, when choices for the future will be made.

 

Space, the driving force behind the human interactions of Babel, is neither a passive plane nor a distant horizon. Space here is a modular, polyhedral frame manipulated by the performers, a device that reflects their will and their vision. It is perhaps the trigger of a counterpoint to individual yearnings for harmony that marked the recent pieces. The frames of the set quite literally remind one of the lines of fissure, the points of rupture, or the extent of flex in a plural, polyglot society.

 

For Babel is Babel now with a superscript, words, the appendage that raises it “to the power of” … words with the ability to heal and cherish but also to dominate, provoke or separate, defeat or maim. How instrumental are words in the build-up to that instant of implosion? And conversely, how effective or inadequate are they in establishing balance or peace?

 

When so much of human relations is underpinned by verbal interaction, the space between two people's interpretation of the same word can become a minefield. Babel intends to question the concept of neutrality in words and whether the potential for both division and creation actually lie in the cadence of the words rather than the meanings they inherit.

 

Rhythms emerge here as a possible common denominator amongst this kaleidoscope of voices and words, the nerve cells that might just convey sense and feeling without distortion. Rhythms that are not just universal, but also timeless: primeval yet constantly new. Rhythms that surround us, and that we all generate: the heartbeat, the breath, footfall on tarmac, thousand of hands clapping in celebration or anticipation …. Or an appeal to god, the roared or whispered syncopated appeal All-ah, chanted again and again through respiration, notes emerging in increasing frenzy until the very breath is inseparable from sound, and the being led into a state of trance.

 

 

 

Tour management: Fransbrood/ Eastman

 

Eastman vzw is a company in residence at Het Toneelhuis, Antwerp.