Storyteller, storyteller of worlds, virtuoso dancer and philosopher in movement, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (Antwerp, 1976) is part of that elite of diversity choreographers who address issues of identity, miscegenation, cultural borders and problems Communication. A creator who has come to save the dance of the 21st century with his global vision – and very oriental and marked by a childhood reading Manga – of artistic expression.
Both the Teatro Real and the Liceu – and the Arriaga months ago – have rushed this season to program his work by the Ballet of the Grand Théâtre de Geneve, the company he has directed since last year, after having freed himself from the most constrained direction. of the Flanders Opera Ballet, in his hometown, a place where, even though he was a contemporary artist, he was forced to defend a very classical idea of ??dance, he said.
The fascination that the audience at the Madrid coliseum experienced this Friday with Ukiyo-e, a piece for two dozen dancers and a half musicians on stage, inspired precisely by the Japanese idea of ??the floating world (the capture of the instant, the present moment, which gives its name to a pictorial movement of the Edo period), will not be the same, however, that the high school experiences in March: in order not to copy the program – which in both cases starts with Faun –, the Rambla theater has chosen to dispense with this last and impressive work by Cherkaoui, very mature, his first as director of the Geneva company, and in its place recovers Noetic, another modern masterpiece that the dance genius made in 2014 for the Ballet de the Göteborg Opera.
This Saturday, the four performances of this debut by the Swiss company will end at the Real in the middle of the Hispanidad Bridge, which has prevented it from being sold out, although it has registered a good entry thanks in part to the trust that the public, heterogeneous and still unaware of contemporary dance, deposits in the artistic line of theater. Converted into a container of luxury as well as a prescriber, the Real is today a good endorsement of the new air that circulates in international ballet companies traditionally tied to the classical and neoclassical repertoire, and that preserve the stylization that distinguishes them. You will like its drift more or less, but the seed of renewal has been laid.
Cherkaoui’s monograph began with this Faun that he created in 2009 for the centenary of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and which is inspired by Nijinski’s legendary choreography of Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, based on Mallarmé’s famous poem about the awakening of the Faun in the forest, which caused a sensation in 1912.
Cherkaoui establishes a dialogue there between the faun – the spectacular Spanish dancer Oscar Comesaña Salgueiro – and his nymph, both entering the forest in a very physical, almost wild and very sexual way, but with an organic and innocent beauty: another reflection on symbiosis of beings and their environment for which Cherkaoui asked Nitin Sawhney to intersperse Debussy’s music with his own musical language.
In Ukiyo-e Cherkaoui dares with a large-format piece supported on the one hand by that quality of lightness of the silk that is reflected in the group movement and, on the other, by that mobile structure of various labyrinthine and Japanese lattices and lattices. versatile, through which dancers rise or abandon themselves to the abyss. A representation of how Cherkaoui senses the world: a place that pushes or holds back. And all of this captured in that moment, that present moment that moves like a slow arrow. And the rest is the echo of our lives.
