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)
Bandung Oct. 9 Taman Budaya
Surabaya Oct. 11 Auditorium Universitas Negeri Surabaya
Yogyakarta Oct. 13 Taman Budaya Yogyakarta