Project
What can dance do that history books can’t?
"History books may supply documents and facts, but this has nothing to do with our experience." Rachid Ouramdane hears this statement time and again when pursuing the traces of military violence. What is the nature of the gap between personal experience and official history? What can dance do that history books can’t?
These questions are pivotal for someone bent on conveying the collective by way of the individual. They are questions that have been kindling Rachid Ouramdane’s choreography over the past 13 years and spanning 15 shows. The same questions propelled the association Fin Novembre, co-founded with Julie Nioche in 1996, and are now being developed through the company L’A., founded in 2007. Whether dealing with recent geographic upheaval, population movements or changes triggered by new technologies, the focal point of Ouramdane’s work is contemporary identity. He creates onstage transformation of live testimonials, for the most part gathered beyond the confines of dance studios: such as in the 2001 show De Arbitre à Zébra with the community of wrestlers and boxers from the city of Reims, or in the 2007 show Surface de réparation with 12 young athletes from the city of Gennevilliers. Ouramdane concocts series of “choreographic portraits” that delve into the undercurrents between individuals and their practices. The aim is not to beautify the practice at hand, but rather to “dancify” it by offering a new “montage”.
The term “montage” aptly describes an approach to dance that encompasses sound-space, lighting design and video tools. The show Au bord des métaphores (1999) launched this onstage friction between bodies and their video-captures. Next came + ou – Là (2002), which questioned “TV grammar”, followed by Les morts pudiques (2004), which explored youth and death based on history fragments culled from the Net. All of his shows share similar underpinnings: depiction of a body pierced by other people’s history, bodies that bear the imprint of history’s spasms and the living memory of adjacent tremors. Each of these bodies grapples with space by way of video screens, much like windows onto the outer world, bodily extensions or glimmers of absence. Rachid Ouramdane probes the polyphony of body-archives, where bodies are often faceless – via helmets, hoods, clown makeup and other sorts of identity-blurring masks. The recurrence of the identity issue - whether social, geographical or cultural - echoes the second-generation immigrant experience. Ouramdane’s Algerian born parents immigrated to France, and this “third identity” imbues his work and has yielded the 2008 semi-autobiographical solo Loin...
In his recent projects, Rachid Ouramdane has been joining forces with documentary-makers, and radicalizing his examination of the boundaries between dance and documentary.
Ouramdane’s desire to spawn new modes of interchange is shared by writer/director Pascal Rambert, giving rise to L’A’s residency at the Théâtre de Genevilliers until June 2010. L’A also collaborates with the Bonlieu-Scène Nationale d’Annecy, and has been invited to perform at numerous international festivals.
