French dancer looks at life from contrasting sides

By Yenni Kwok

JAKARTA (JP): In the eyes of French ballet dancer Olivier Patey, the world is a tentatively balanced dichotomy.

"I believe that we live in the world of opposites: love and hate, happiness and sadness," said Patey. "Life works by embracing and balancing these opposites."

His philosophy of life is reflected in L'Union de Contraires (The Union of the Contrasts), which he choreographed. The word "union" truly reflects the elements of the performance.

Students and dancers from Indonesia's top ballet schools, Sumber Cipta and Namarina, will be united on July 11 and 12 at Gedung Kesenian Jakarta.

The premier dancer of Opera de Paris will not perform during his Jakarta visit. Instead, he composed the new piece and is teaching it to local dancers during his Jakarta visit.

Accompanying Patey, a cheerful man who loves to talk and smile, is Michael Costiou, a quiet and shy French painter who will design the costumes and decorate the stage.

"Costiou is calm, very unlike me. I am usually anxious, but try to appear a calm person," said Patey.

For the second time in their lives, the polar opposites are working together. Patey will choreograph and create the movements, on which Costiou will base his costume and stage design.

Costiou is famous for his spontaneous painting of ballet movements. Using Chinese black ink and acrylic, he has decorated several ballet performances while the dancers performed on stage.

Although Costiou won't be decorating during the show, he will still try to capture realistic movements by watching Patey and his dancers rehearsing.

Despite their differences, Costiou and Patey can relate to each other. "When painters are facing a blank sheet and choreographers are facing an empty stage, we face the same challenge," Costiou said.

Around 20 dancers will take part in this production, which involves different schools of ballet. Patey has been the premier ballet dancer for Opera de Paris since 1983. Founded by the late Nani Lubis, Namarina derived much of its influence from London's Royal Academy of Dancing, from which Lubis' daughter Maya Tamara graduated. Meanwhile Sumber Cipta follows the Russian Bolshoi, the school that founder-director Farida Oetoyo attended.

Theme

The two directors deny that Patey's big theme of contrasts and opposites apply to Namarina and Sumber Cipta.

"Ballet is universal," said Maya Tamara, the director of Namarina. "The schools are like different orchestras in classical music. There might be the New York Philharmonic Orchestra or London Symphony Orchestra, but they all play the same classical music. Our language is one."

Maya and Farida, both experienced ballet teachers and choreographers, chose to take the back seat and let Patey use all his creativity and skills for this performance.

Patey's deep deliberations clearly inspired this creation. "It is difficult sometimes to see things the opposite of what we feel. When I am so happy, it is difficult to understand why people feel sad. But, in fact, these opposing feelings co-exist inside us."

He will divide the performance into two parts. The first reflects the growing of the opposites. Here, he explores joy and sorrow, creation and destruction, worry and calm. The second part is about accepting the opposites and relinquishing them. This time, he ventures into the emotions of pleasure and pain, truth and lies, to remember and to forget, to stay and to disappear.

Trained in dance from the age of eight, Patey is never reluctant to share his knowledge with other dancers in his own country and all around the world. He has traveled and taught in Japan, Paraguay, Cuba and Cairo.

"Olivier Patey can adapt to the situation here," said Farida, explaining that the local dancers, who are mostly amateurs, need to undergo different training than professionals.

As Patey turned 40 this year, he is planning to retire soon, possibly next year. "Most dancers usually retire around 40 to 50 years old," he said. "Some big stars are still dancing in their later years because they are famous or still in high demand. But sometimes they are not dancing as well as they were used to."

Patey still plans to dance to his own choreographed works, but he is now more active behind the scenes than on stage. With L'Union de Contraires, he has choreographed 25 dances. He also produces some performances for his theater company, Opera de Paris.

Innocent

Although he is inspired to paint by ballet movements, Costiou admits that he sometimes get bored by the ballet itself. "But, overall I like it very much," said the 50-year-old with the disarmingly innocent face.

Innocent and pure is perhaps the best way to describe his exhibition, currently displayed at the French Cultural Center gallery until July 12. Besides his framed or scroll paintings, he also decorates the gallery with colorful traces of his hands and feet, creating a childlike frivolity in the space.

Ballet is one of Costiou's main focuses, but not the only one. He also paints the circus, opera, music, theater and even sports. As an observer, he translates the movements into the swaying of bodies, hands and the twirl of the ballerinas' dresses forming a series of pictures, making them look like a comic strip.

His art has a distinctive style, occasionally resembling calligraphy. The figures are scribbled, yet they are dynamic, capturing the energy of the dance movements.

Maya could not hide her awe at how Costiou's scribbles convey complex ballet movements. "It seems that he really knows about dance," she said.

Costiou swears he never studied how to dance. How, then, does he know and understand so much about it? "Maybe I was a dancer in my previous life," the German-born artist said with a shrug.