Dance troupe forms multicultural meeting point

Dance troupe forms multicultural meeting point

Helly Minarti, Contributor, Jakarta

Some choreographers of contemporary dance -- including those who
have made it big -- fuse centuries-old traditions into their
modern technique, creating a new, distinct style of their own.

East meets West, Indian Kathak dance meets the modern in the
case of Briton Akram Khan, or as Taiwanese Lin Hwa-min of
Cloudgate Dance Company finally discovered as "the East Asian
body", referring to his dancers' training in ballet and modern
techniques as well as tai chi and the body work of the Peking
Opera.

For French choreographer Kader Attou of Accrorap, the stage is
a meeting point of different dance styles, and yet he boldly
claims that what he is trying to create is not a "fusion".

A quite sizzling meeting point, if you talk about a stage
where streetwise hip-hop dancers perform together with a jazz
peer, while the other troupe members are dancers trained in
Indian Kathak plus another in Bharatanatyam. It's a case of the
Orient meeting the Occident.

Atop the layers of various dance styles, the one-hour-long
dance piece, titled Anokha, is divided into four philosophy-
imbued sections: coming together, the purified form of the
swastika, Asuras and the nonviolence movement of Gandhi, with 15
minutes each. Here, the swastika, infamous as a pan-Aryan symbol,
is returned to its original Indian meaning as an auspicious
symbol.

All of this came together in 2000, when Attou was commissioned
to perform in a dance festival in Lyon, correctly themed "Silk
Route", which took him to Ahmedabad, India, to source material
for the divine dances (Bharatanatyam used to be a temple dance
before performed on stage), and put it side by side with his
"profane" hip-hop.

Multiculturalism is in the veins of Accrorap. Founded by Attou
and Eric Menzino, the founding dancers/choreographers of Accrorap
belong to different cultural ethos: Attou and Habib Benziane are
of Algerian origin, Pierre Bolo is French and Jose comes from
Switzerland.

Christelle Blanc, the only female dancer of Accrorap,
specialized in jazz before the Indian trio of Vaishali Trivedi,
Prashant Shah and Rukmini Chatterjee came along. Sebastian Vela
Lopez is included on the Indonesian tour.

Anokha celebrates each dance style within the spacious space,
filling it with eclectic hip-hop movement nicely matched with
jazz steps, at times intertwined with the slender, flowing,
stylized Kathak and the striking Bharatanatyam. At one point, two
dancers are engaged in a dialog, more like one posing a question
while the other responds.

The music feeds the spirit as the four dance styles delve into
each depth, and explore the stage/space, themselves and
possibilities. The approach, surprisingly, feels fresh, and that
meeting point works, wiping out doubts that the idea might slip
into the pitfall of banality of "patching" one style with
another.

Brought here by the French Cultural Centre (CCF) for one-night
only shows in four cities, the performance is revealing in the
beautiful truth of contemporary dance that it doesn't have
boundaries.

And presenting something like Accrorap that tells a lot about
multicultural France is at least a more appropriate choice
compared to the huge Karin Saporta troupe that CCF once brought
here.

Jakarta

Oct. 7, 2003, 8 p.m.
Gedung Kesenian Jakarta (GKJ)
Jl. Gedung Kesenian Jakarta No. 1
Jakarta
Ticket box: tel. 380-8283
Tickets: Rp 20,000, Rp 35,000 (students Rp 15,000)

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